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'Scraps' offered at UN to Entertain Heads of State

(China Daily USA)

Updated: 2015-09-29 16:00:26

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A novel lunch made of food scraps was offered to the heads of state during a luncheon at the UN Headquarters in New York this Sunday.

The special treat was inspired by the UN Climate Conference to be held in Paris on this December, according to Sam Cass, one of the two chiefs in charge of the meal.

By recycling wasted food, Sam Cass and the other chief Dan Barber aimed to raise people's awareness of massive food waste and its impact on global climate change.

"We all think the climate conference is the most important conference in our lives," Sam Cass said, "But except a small portion of environmentalists, nobody on the conference would discuss the edible part of the kitchen waste."

French President Francois Hollande and Peru President Ollanta Humala Tasso attended the luncheon to support the UN Climate Conference.

One of these specials, according to AFP, was a vegeburg made of the vegetable juice leftover which was usually discarded as waste. Matching with the vegeburg, the raw material of French fries were maizena used as animals' feed.

The challenge to the chiefs was to turn the waste that people usually considered into delicious dishes. "It was supposed to be a typical American meal. But we made it different. We don't feed on beef, but the maize feeding the cattle," Dan Barber said.

Data from UN indicates that 3,300 million tons of CO2 were emitted during the processing of the food people wasted.

"Food waste is often neglected when it refers to global climate change," said Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary-General, "Considering numerous people (in the world) are still in hunger, wasting food is a shame."