Restaurants Put Recycling on Menu

For 83 years, the Pacific Dining Car, with its mahogany walls, brass fixtures and ample portions of omelets Florentine and steak and eggs, has been a symbol of old-fashioned epicurean indulgence.

This year, the venerable downtown eatery also became an environmental trendsetter, one of the first restaurants to recycle food as part of a city-sponsored experiment. The project is modeled after one in San Francisco that has attracted worldwide interest.

Instead of throwing leftovers in the garbage, cooks and dishwashers collect customers’ unfinished steaks and salads, along with the potato peels, fish bones, melon rinds and other scraps generated in the kitchen, in blue recycling bins.

The food waste, which adds up to more than 3 tons a week, is shipped to Bakersfield, where it is combined with grass clippings to make an exceptionally nutrient-rich compost used by farmers who grow grapes, watermelons, cherries and carrots.

“We take and take from the Central Valley, but we never give anything back,” said Berty Siegels, Pacific Dining Car’s executive chef. “Well, now we do.”

More than 30 Los Angeles restaurants have joined the program, including such landmarks as Musso & Frank Grill and El Coyote Cafe.

They are recycling food, saving money on their trash bills and reducing waste sent to landfills while providing California farmers with a new source of nourishment for their crops.

Los Angeles already encourages restaurants to send uneaten meals to food banks, but most table scraps and kitchen scraps are not edible.

Food waste makes up a sizable portion of the garbage that winds up in landfills around the country.

In California, more than 5 million tons of food scraps are discarded every year -- about 16% of all the garbage that residents, businesses and government institutions send to the dumps, according to the state’s Integrated Waste Management Board.

San Francisco in 1996 became the first large city to start a food recycling program. Officials there were searching for a way to comply with a 1989 state law requiring cities to divert half of their garbage from landfills.

Unlike Los Angeles, which could turn its ample green waste into compost, San Francisco didn’t have enough grass to meet the requirement.

More than 2,200 businesses and 75,000 households participate in San Francisco’s food recycling program, yielding 300 tons a day of what waste management officials have dubbed “four course compost.” The high-grade natural fertilizer, good enough for organic farms, is helping grow some of the finest wine grapes in the Napa Valley.

“Growers are always trying to improve and do things that are better for the environment. For us, this compost is a great source of nutrition for the vines. It’s kind of like a slow-release vitamin,” said Remi Cohen, vineyard manager at Bouchaine Vineyards in the southern end of Napa Valley.

Cohen admitted she was concerned at first about disease-causing contamination in compost made from food waste. But she said research into the two-month composting process convinced her that any pathogens in the food scraps were broken down over time and that the product was more environmentally sound than chemical-based fertilizers.

San Francisco’s success helped spawn a similar program in neighboring Oakland, where 135 restaurants, hotels and hospitals are turning food scraps into compost.

It has attracted interest from officials in India, England, Taiwan and South Korea, said Robert Reed, a spokesman for Norcal Waste Systems Inc. The trash hauler runs the food recycling programs in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

“We are selling everything we make,” Reed said. “There’s plenty of big farms in California and a growing interest in finding alternatives to chemical fertilizers.”

Although Los Angeles was able to comply with the state law to divert half of the waste going to landfills, City Hall has upped the ante, setting a goal of steering 70% away from dumps by 2020.

Officials say food recycling will help meet that quota.

City officials initially struggled to find restaurants willing to try food recycling. After trying mailers and phone calls, they began buttonholing managers in person to make their case about the voluntary program. Pacific Dining Car was an obvious choice. A popular breakfast spot for government officials, it was already recycling its bottles and cans, even though restaurants are not required to do so.

“We’ve found that 75% of the waste from restaurants is food and organic waste. So this is a huge waste stream,” said Daniel K. Meyers, a civil engineer with the Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation. “Our goal is to see if we can establish a food recycling program that can sustain itself.”

By next spring, Los Angeles officials hope to increase the number of participating restaurants to 150.

For the time being, city officials are subsidizing the cost of the food recycling experiment with fees from waste haulers. As a result, many of the restaurants taking part are saving hundreds of dollars on their garbage bills.

However, city officials eventually plan to pass the full operating costs along to restaurants. It remains to be seen whether restaurateurs will still want to recycle food if they do not save money.

“Things have been beautiful so far. We are very happy with it,” said John Garcia, Musso & Frank kitchen manager, who estimated his monthly trash bill had dropped from $1,000 to $200.

Asked whether he would continue if the savings declined or disappeared, Garcia said, “It all depends how much it’s going to be. If I like the price, I don’t see why not.”

Restaurants don’t seem particularly eager to publicize the program, even if it is good for the planet.

“It’s not the kind of thing we’d want to advertise,” said Mike Green, Pacific Dining Car’s general manager. “People don’t want to think about smelly trash while they are eating their expensive meal.”

Indeed, some Pacific Dining Car patrons were surprised last week when informed that their leftovers were being recycled.

“I’m afraid to ask what that means,” said John Baker, a Texas attorney visiting California on business.

When told that it meant food was being converted into compost that helped grow more food, Baker and other lunchtime customers voiced strong support.

“If it can be turned into compost or something else that’s valuable instead of going to a landfill, I don’t see why it would be controversial.

“I think everyone should do it,” he said.

There seemed to be plenty of enthusiasm for the practice in the kitchen as well.

“This was all going to waste before. That was dumb,” Juan Perez, a 62-year-old cook at Pacific Dining Car, said in Spanish as he peeled potatoes during a recent lunch hour, throwing the skins into the recycling bin.

“For us, it’s the same amount of work, and it helps the farmers, so why not do it?”