The biggest obstacle to zero waste is mindset.
“You’re not supposed to be permanently reducing your food waste. You’re supposed to prevent that - by design,” says chef Vojtech Végh.
March 30 is International Zero Waste Day, and to learn more about this important topic, especially in hospitality, we talked to Vojtech Végh. Végh is a zero-waste and plant-based chef, author, and founder of the world's first zero-waste and vegan restaurant. He teaches chefs how to implement zero waste practices at his company Surplus Food Studio.
(The Cocktail Balance) Hi Vojtech, so nice to meet you! I’m really looking forward to hearing about zero waste in gastronomy. But first, how did you get started working in kitchens in the first place?
(Vojtech Végh) I went to a vocational high school for cooking, mostly because a bunch of my classmates were going. I started out in the program for waiters the first year, but I hated being a waiter. I was 15. I realized I could hide in the kitchen instead, so the second year I started learning to be a chef. But it took many years before I started to enjoy it.
It’s so hard to decide when you are 14 or 15 what to study. Who knows what they want to do when they are that age?
Exactly. At first, I hated it. But then we were given internships placements through school and I went to a five star hotel in Greece for the summer. It was there that I started to realize that the food we cook can be of good quality, that we could cook nice dishes. As they gave me more responsibility in the kitchen, I started to enjoy it more. Especially live cooking in front of guests, and I could hand guests their food. There I realized that I could imagine myself cooking for a living. At that point, I lost my interest in school and just pushed myself to finish.
After that, I just wanted to get out of Slovakia and was looking for the next place I could go. I figured I needed to learn English in order to travel, so off I went to England. I would find seasonal cooking jobs, work long enough to save money and then travel, run out of money, and then go back to England to work.
But every job I had made me hungry to get better than when I started the job. I really wanted to learn and be the best, so then I pushed myself into better places, Michelin star places. It didn’t matter whether it was for an internship or a job, or what country it was in, I just took the opportunities as they came. I wanted to squeeze in as much learning and experience as I could into the time I had.
As I worked in more places and learned more, I realized there were things in a restaurant I didn’t like but the only way to fix it was to take control and open my own place. I have always been business minded and wanted to make my own decisions, so it became clear that one day I would open my own restaurant, it was just a question of figuring out where and when and how.
Through all that experience, how did you come to zero waste as a principle?
There wasn’t a singular moment of awakening for me, it just developed naturally. I grew up in a small village in Slovakia and - farm is too strong of a word - but we had a large vegetable garden and were quite self-sufficient, we rarely ate meat. We were always mindful of what we were using because we produced it ourselves. So that was always in the back of my mind. Then I had a job with a new restaurant that was opening with a head chef who was very focused on all the byproducts created in the kitchen. The words zero waste were never mentioned though.
Zero waste is a new term.
Yeah, it wasn’t so much because he wanted to be zero waste but because he was pushing the search for flavour in parts of products that are normally not used. We think of one part of some produce as the main part and the other part as waste. He wanted to focus on everything. It was very high quality cooking, he wanted to be better as a chef and to show us that there is value in everything that comes into the kitchen. That kind of connected the dots for me, the things I had seen in various jobs and was a natural progression from how I grew up. It just made sense.
I knew that one day I would open my own restaurant, and so I added an extra level and decided that it had to be zero waste. It makes sense financially, being efficient, looking for flavour and offering more value to your guests and putting more on the plate.
So then you opened your own restaurant in Cambodia.
I had travelled among most Southeast Asian countries in the off-seasons, and Cambodia was one of the few countries where it was possible for me as a foreigner to start my own business there. Europe wasn’t an option at that time. Siem Reap had a tight-knit community of foreigners and locals who were very focused on all kinds of positive things for the planet, upcycling initiatives, recycling, not only gastronomy. I loved it. There were so many small-scale artisans making products that I could see using in my restaurant. I was still flying back and forth; from the time I decided to open a restaurant there it still took two years to actually make it happen.
There are a lot of obstacles to opening a restaurant in Cambodia and a zero waste one on top of that. With fairly limited resources and knowledge at the time, I certainly overestimated a few things. I was very dogmatic at the time. Zero meant zero in everything, and this is a major challenge in an Asian country. Asian countries really love plastic everything.
So I was trying to be zero waste, opening on my own without any partners at the time. I was the only person behind the restaurant, so it took a long time, but we managed. It happened.
Source: Vojtech Végh
What did you learn the most from the restaurant? What was the biggest takeaway?
Oh, so much. As you said, the term zero waste is new, but zero doesn’t mean zero, it’s never going to be completely zero. There is going to be some waste somewhere at some point created by someone in the process.
What do you define zero waste to be?
Trying to get as close to zero as possible while at the same time knowing that it’s unlikely to ever be actually zero. If you happen to have 5% or 10% waste, then that’s great. The goal is to have as little waste as possible, we can call it low waste.
With the restaurant it was also important to support local. I needed everything local and, for ingredients, organic. There were a lot of challenges, so I don’t know if I can say there is a particular takeaway. I’m sure I shortened my life by a few years in the process. I used to work 20-22 hours a day, sometimes just an hour nap, back and forth. For me, there was no way that it wasn’t going to be perfectly zero waste, but I almost killed myself in the process.
Could you say that your takeaway from the restaurant was a more practical approach?
Absolutely. Not everything needs to happen on day one, not everything needs to be perfect on day one. Get as close as possible to the good thing. There will always be troubles - I tried my hardest but there were some simple things that I couldn’t find my way around and wasted time and resources and nerves trying to.
For example, you need to buy appliances for a kitchen. There’s no way around it. They come wrapped in styrofoam. What can we do with styrofoam? Someone told me you can melt down styrofoam in acetone and mold it into something that can used like a decoration or something. So I tried it. It was a terrible idea.
Oh my goodness, all those gasses.
I was sitting on the floor of the dining room at midnight with a pot of acetone, dropping in styrofoam. Imagine what I was breathing in, I’m looking at it wondering, ok, now I have this sticky toxic glue in front of me, what do I do with it now? Sometimes it’s just better to get over it and accept that it is what it is. Let’s focus on what I actually have in my control.
But, there were so many of these missteps. Like, on the very first day of opening, someone couldn’t finish her lunch and asked for it to-go. I didn’t have anything to give her the lunch in, so I ended up wrapping the food in a napkin and giving it away.
A cloth napkin of course.
Yes, of course, They were napkins for the tasting menu for dinner so they were really high quality and very expensive. But I realized that it was all learning for me.
It also takes time to educate customers. If you are an established place and, for example, a coffee shop that encourages people to bring in their own coffee cups if they want it to-go. But it doesn’t usually happen on day one, it takes time.
Yes, I had people coming in and leaving behind their own plastic bottle. I literally had no bin in the kitchen, so I had to send my staff to run outside to put it in the public bin. What was I supposed to do with it? You know, I never put a waste bin in the kitchen, although I did end up putting in a compost bin we took to the permaculture farm where I bought produce. I didn’t even have that in the beginning, we were running completely binless at first.
That takes dedication.
But you know, we were doing a certain volume and we had to take care of certain things that couldn’t be eaten - maybe an accident or burning something. I hadn’t taken that into account. I took almost two years to plan it; I clearly should have taken even more time.
Source: Vojtech Végh
That’s what I saw when I was cooking. If there was a system in place then it took care of itself, you didn’t have to think or worry about it - which takes time, and time is what no kitchen ever has enough of.
Yes, it takes a lot of time in the planning stage for the sake of saving time later on, and it also takes time to figure out what works and what doesn’t. But once you have it figured out, then you are good. If I open another restaurant, I know that year one certainly won’t be the best; only as we question what can we do differently and better can we improve.
I wouldn’t put pressure on myself again to be completely zero waste, no waste bin, no compost bin. I would go as low waste as possible, as much local organic as possible. But not pushing it to completely crazy limits like I did before. I was unwilling to accept anything that wasn’t organic in the kitchen. In the end, I had to accept some compromises because otherwise there were only 15 types of leafy vegetables available.
What do you do when your work becomes a grind? Do you ever feel hopeless about the situation, that we’re never going to change and the planet is just going to die?
No, no, I’m a very positive person. I see changes happening, I see the interest and know a lot of people who are doing great things. Great things are happening, although not at the speed they should be, there are also bad things happening, but general awareness is rising. Even big companies are doing things, although there is a lot of greenwashing as well. But I think we are finding our route back to how we’re supposed to connect with the planet.
What do you see as the biggest obstacle in gastronomy in terms of zero waste?
The mindset and habits. That is why I focus on the human factor in my work. That’s why I talk so much about mindset because it all starts in our head. Why are we calling it waste in the first place, when it’s edible? How do we frame it in our heads? How do we treat ingredients, how do we value ingredients, do we value them at all? And habits, they teach us certain things in schools and colleges, it is easy to just stick to what we know, not being open to doing things in new ways. If it’s worked for 20 years, why change? Practical skills can be taught to anyone, but the willingness and the openness are the most important.
You mentioned that you grew up in a self-sufficient household, and I grew up on a small organic cattle farm. When you see how much work goes into producing a vegetable or a cow or what have you, when you see how much work, time, and energy that goes into it, you appreciate it more. Everyone wants steak but a cow has only so many steak cuts, if you start to serve oxtails, some people wrinkle their nose and think it’s gross. But respect for a product means using all of it.
There’s a disconnect between chefs and ingredients. We’re stuck in a kitchen for 12 hours a day. When was the last time a chef was on a farm? Maybe at the beginning of a collaboration they visit a farm, but not regularly. But if you switch between roles, one day on the farm and one day in the kitchen, if you water and weed that produce and then see a colleague waste it, then suddenly it becomes apparent that it’s not the right thing to do.
When I thought of zero waste in a kitchen, the process I thought of was making food for the menu, then looking at what is left over and asking how it could be used. But you have a different approach, which for me was a light bulb moment.
What you describe is what I call the wrong approach, the approach of reduction. If you are actively producing waste day by day, and in a separate time looking at what you can do with the waste, then you will always need that extra time on a daily basis. That is work that will constantly require extra effort, extra time from your side.
You’re not supposed to be permanently reducing your food waste. You’re supposed to prevent that - by design. You factor in extra time for planning the menu and writing up the dishes and designing a system for it. For example, if I know I will have potato peels, the time to think about potato peels is when you are creating your menu. It doesn't have to be on the same dish, or even the same menu.
If we think of waste as a problem we will solve later, there is never time for those later things.
There is never time because it’s not a priority, and the reason it’s not a priority is because it’s not necessary. You need to create a system where you need those potato peels, maybe for another dish or a special or an event, then they become a crucial ingredient that I need in my kitchen and they immediately rise up to the top of the priority list, at the same level as everything else.
If it is a big place with multiple outlets, it’s easier because you have so many opportunities to create a circular menu. Banquets, events, fancy restaurants, casual restaurants, etc. An independent restaurant needs to really think about it. We never want to compromise on the quality or flavour of a dish, so sometimes you need to preserve it for another season, another menu.
Summer and spring have so much quantity of quality produce, you might not be able to put everything on the same menu. If you preserve food, you’ll have created new ingredients for the winter season at zero cost, the product has already been paid for.
Have you worked with bars in your consulting business?
If you are preparing cocktails, you’re essentially preparing liquid food. The same zero waste principles apply to a bar as to a kitchen. In a restaurant I’m using solid food, in a bar you’re using a liquid preparation of those same things. You might be limited in the opportunities to serve those products, maybe some of them need to become small snacks. I know a lot of great bars are doing interesting things with garnishes or amuse bouche, maybe a cracker or fruit leather. There are great ways to extract flavours from ingredients in a liquid form that might not be so easy to eat solid. Again it’s about mindset.
One of my favourite things about the upside of working with liquid food, whether kitchen or bar, is how practical it is to freeze liquid food. No changing flavor, no changing texture. You are safe to freeze anything, and keep incorporating it into your plan. It is really practical, you can create large batches and take the pressure off of using it the same day or next day.
When I worked in the kitchen, some chefs had a rather snobby attitude towards freezers.
Freezers and frozen food have been really demonized over the last decades. We think of frozen ready-made meals. But a freezer is a chef’s best friend. It’s probably the best tool you can have in your kitchen. I could be a salesman for a freezer company.
If you put something in the fridge, what is the shelf-life? Two or three days. You put something in the freezer, you slow down the entire process and it lasts two or three months. It’s even more safe. In a fridge, the temperature isn’t stable because you are opening the door. Is it vacuum packed 100%? How many times has it been opened? Preserving flavours in oil, there is zero loss of quality, it does not impact the flavour. Purees as well.
Source: Vojtech Végh
You mentioned before about organic vs conventional ingredients. How do you balance the cost factor? Lemons are a classic example - if it’s not organic then I don’t want to use the peel, but if all the lemons are organic that gets expensive really fast.
I’ve done a lot of reading and really, no one wants to know the true extent of how various chemicals impact us. There is not a lot of specific information about it. If you are unable to go organic, you don’t want to compromise your health in the name of zero waste.
When we look at different types of produce we can also treat them differently. For example, root vegetables - there is no direct application of chemicals on a carrot itself, the peel is thin so whatever chemicals are on the peel are also in the carrot. It’s distributed in watering and in the seed-coating. It doesn’t matter if you peel it or not. On the other hand, citrus has a thick peel, there is direct application of chemicals on the fruit. I will not eat non-organic citrus peels because there will be more chemicals in the peel than in the fruit itself. But a cauliflower from the supermarket, the leaves have the same amount of chemicals as the actual cauliflower, so if I am willing to eat the cauliflower then I also eat the leaves. Wasting the leaves will not save me from eating chemicals.
But really, you can ignore everything I’ve said because most of the chemical load is contained in the seed coating, there is an extreme concentration of chemicals before it even goes in the soil.
Well, that makes me feel better about spending more money on organic seeds this spring.
In gastronomy the price has to be factored in, expect the margins, calculate what you can, and try to make back as much as you can through food waste prevention. Spending money on organic ingredients is good at multiple levels, not only for agriculture but also in supporting small suppliers, providing more nutritious and tasty meals for guests because usually those ingredients have more flavour. Sure, it will cost you more. Now try to make that extra expense back on the fact that you’re not going to waste as much, or anything, of the product because you are confident you can use every single tiny part of that whole ingredient. That way the yield of an ingredient will be higher, which lowers your cost per dish.
A friend of mine worked at the Ministry of Agriculture and she was in a meeting regarding the norms for chemical residues on various produce. Someone brought up the issue that people are starting to eat radish leaves and there is no norm set for the leaf, only for the root. It was a big problem. One person got frustrated and said, “Well, people shouldn’t be eating the leaves!”
You can also think of it, why are you poisoning my leaf?
Ha, great way to put it.
It’s very hard to prove either side. Another consideration is that oftentimes the nutritional content of the skins and leaves are higher than the main product because of antioxidants and fiber, etc. The question is, does it balance it all out? Nobody knows.
Tell me about your company, Surplus Food Studio. You have a book, online course, workshops? Which would you recommend to who?
The content of the course is based on the book, but I could only put so many pages into the book. The basics, the frame of the philosophy is in the book, and the course goes into more depth.
I created the course because I found in my consulting that 90% of the time the questions, issues, challenges were the same. To make it easier for everyone I put the content into an eight week course. It’s very dense in content, focusing not only on the practical steps of implementation and standardization of operations but also about the mindset. It’s not a cooking course, it’s not really about recipes or how to prepare dishes, but how to think when you are planning, how to plan a circular menu, how to create systems, how to make it work in your kitchen and overcome challenges. There is a step by step plan, 17 tasks, a To Do List for chefs. The course is a journey for a chef, starting from the point where you aren’t doing much and in eight weeks you’ll have created new standard operating procedures.
That then gives me room to focus my consulting more on the practical issues of each place, rather than answering the same questions over and over. So I also have workshops, master classes, pop-ups, conferences, presentations.
The book does have an ingredient directory and sample recipes, but it’s more about the mindset and questioning things. It’s written for chefs so it’s very direct and to the point, short chapters. Asking provocative questions - which some people don’t like.
I can see that, if someone thinks they are doing a good job and someone comes along and questions it, asking if it could be done differently or better. There would be resistance to that.
I like to stay on the provocative side to keep things interesting.
Vojtech, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me today. Getting the industry in on the mindset of preventing food waste is so important, and I wish you all the best of luck in your mission.