UK entrepreneur makes hummus from unwanted vegetables
London-based food entrepreneur, Hannah McCollum, is trying to combat this and is using the waste to make a profit. She turns waste vegetables into hummus and is crowdfunding a campaign to scale her production up to utilize even more unwanted veggies.
“I’m doing my part,” she says. “But it’s only on a small scale. I know there are farmers with crops that I can take and support. But there’s so much.”
McCollum can’t abide waste. Her aversion to it began when she left school. She completed culinary training and then started working with catering companies at sports events and private parties.
“At the end of every event, there was the most phenomenal amount of waste— smoked salmon, steak, breads, croissants, cheese. I mean huge chunks of it, all going into the bin. I tried to do something about it but I’d get told off. I had to stop because I felt like it was a Herculean task trying to save all that food from waste.”
After leaving the world of catering she became a chef, where she had more of an outlet to fight waste in her own kitchen.
“When I was cooking for large numbers, I started turning leftovers into dips or hummus for the next day,” she remembers. “People loved them. They were tasty, bright, and colorful, and it was a nice way of using what would have otherwise become waste.”
“I started going to the street market round the corner from me, where they threw away a lot,” McCollum says. “Every time I went, I found myself coming home with an entire carload of all this surplus, and I was like, ‘God, this is getting ridiculous.’ I was making work for myself because I couldn’t bear to see the food wasted.”
source: munchies.vice.com