Many free materials are readily at your disposal to teach the “3 Rs” of handling excess prepared food, food scraps and used oil more sustainably.

By Christopher Koetke, CEC, CCE

Many of us grew up with that wise adage, but it’s even more true today. In sustainability, when we talk about waste, the focus is usually on recycling and composting—basically, how to divert our waste from the landfill. However, that’s not the most sustainable solution. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have developed a program that advocates use of its “Food Waste Recovery Hierarchy.” We often talk about the “3 Rs”—reduce, reuse or recycle—and this program prioritizes those options.

Reduce. The most sustainable waste option is to not create it in the first place. According to Jonathan Bloom, author of American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It), Americans routinely toss out 40% of all the food produced each year. And it’s important to keep in mind that along with the wasted food, we also wasted the water, energy and other resources used to produce, harvest and transport it to our kitchens.

By Margaret Checchi, M.Ed.

Successful transitioning from hands-on learning to hybridized classes depends on faculty who can create dynamic and engaging course content delivered with students’ best interests in mind.

A decade ago, it was unheard of to serve foams and essences; it was unrealistic to manipulate food at the very heart of its molecular structure. What seemed unrealistic and impossible then is becoming almost mainstream now. So it is with education.

At New England Culinary Institute, our students slurp coffee desperately in the cold, black dark of the pre-dawn chill, hunching over pocket notebooks filled with ratios, temperatures, cook times and formulas as they create the day’s menus and generate mise en place lists. They are like the students before them and the ones before them, since Socrates held lessons in the olive grove. With luck, Chef will come into the kitchen having had a good night’s sleep and the students will get through the day without feeling completely inadequate.

According to NPD, more adult consumers aspire to eat smaller portions in the coming year, suggesting that this healthy eating strategy will become more important in the future.

Portion control is a tenet of healthy eating, and it appears that consumers are increasingly aware of the importance of managing the portion size of the foods they eat, according to The NPD Group, a leading market research company.

For a recent report entitled “Healthy Eating Strategies by Generation,” NPD compiled a list of 30 healthy eating and lifestyle dimensions to determine which ones consumers of different generations associate with healthy eating. Out of the 30 attributes, eating smaller portions ranked 11^th in importance among adult consumers across generations as a healthy-eating characteristic. Adult consumers ranked the top five characteristics of healthy eating and healthy lifestyles consistently: exercise regularly, eat well-balanced meals, eat all things in moderation, limit/avoid foods with saturated fat or cholesterol or trans fats, and drink at least eight glasses of water per day.

Technomic identifies what consumers find most appealing about burgers offered at more than 40 leading limited- and full-service chains.

A new study released by trend-tracker Technomic finds burger consumption up considerably since 2009, with nearly half of today’s consumers saying they eat a burger at least once a week compared with 38% two years ago. One reason for the increase is the continued prominence of burgers on quick-service value menus.

“The value menu is certainly a big part of this increase in burger consumption,” says Sara Monnette, director of consumer research at Chicago-based Technomic. “There are other factors at work, however, as the specialty-burger craze has driven growth in a way that is almost defiantly separate from pricing. The better burger restaurants in the fast-casual segment have put the burger top of mind for consumers, and even the quick-service chains have begun to respond and focus portions of their menus specifically on quality perceptions.”

Total and fried seafood servings at restaurants are on the decline, but non-fried seafood consumption is increasing.

The decline in seafood servings at U.S. restaurants has less to do with natural and man-made disasters like the Gulf oil spill and more to do with the economy and price, according to The NPD Group, a leading market research company. NPD's foodservice market research finds that total seafood and fried seafood servings have been declining for several years, while servings of non-fried seafood have increased over the last two years.