From Wasted Bread to a Savory Bowl of Pasta:
Leif & Jorge’s Trendy Proposal to Eat
By Maria Luz Nochez
Copenhagen is known for its culinary scene. Its restaurants and bakeries have positioned the city not only as the top culinary destination of 2023 but as the “restaurant capital of the Nordics.” However, the city has hosted a new trendy series of events that literally invite people to eat garbage, topped with DJs and a skate hall turned into a dance floor. Instead of making funny faces, people’s reaction to eating trash has been bringing their bowls and appetites to become part of the Eat Waste community.
It all started in late January 2022, a few weeks after Lief Friedmann arrived in Copenhagen intending to give life to his pasta from bread waste project. As he was trying to get familiarized with more people in the culinary Danish community, he decided to look for a part-time job. That’s how he bumped into Jorge López while he was taking pictures outside of Empirical, a distillery known for its passion for flavor located in Copenhagen. “I had kind of longtime fascination with this place. So I just went up to him and we started talking”, remembers Lief as he tells the story of how he ended up not working there but making a friend who later became his business partner.
By the time they met, Jorge still considered himself a new person in town, as he had only arrived in Denmark in September 2021, after the company decided to transfer him –their former Creative and Art Director– from Mexico. He and Lief decided to take a coffee one week later and as he heard what Lief was cooking he undoubtedly decided to take part in it. “I was thinking ‘This is genius, I need to help this guy do this!’ And at the same time, I was also thinking that this is really obvious. Like, how come no one has done this before? Immediately I was hooked. I got obsessed with it.”
Leif and Jorge with a group of volunteers.Photos: taken from @eatwasted Instagram page
Jorge was right. There are plenty of recipes online on how to make homemade pasta with breadcrumbs while at the same time, bread occupies one of the highest food waste categories in the world, especially in developed countries. To put the project on track what they needed the most, even before a name, was bread. So the natural step was to invite bakeries to be part of it. In a country like Denmark where the government has raised awareness in the last few years against food waste, and that six months before announced a project to help repurpose unsold bread as pasta, crackers, muesli bars or similar products, one might anticipate that such an idea would easily find bakeries eager to help.
It was not the case. “People were super skeptical in the beginning, we emailed maybe 30 bakeries, and only got one response”, says Leif. Even though the lack of enthusiasm and the short number of responses were different from what they expected, the one who replied was not just anybody. Hart Bakery bit the bate. Besides being the bakery that provides baked goods to Noma, the most famous fine dining restaurant in Copenhagen, Hart is considered not only the best in the country’s capital but one of the best in the world. “The whole team was into it, but particularly this one manager was just like ‘Wow, I want to stop wasting bread. How do we work with you?’ It was the perfect place to get started and the perfect kind of collaborator”, Lief adds.
Once they figured out a system to tackle bread waste and collaborate with them, all Leif and Jorge needed were guests, even more than the definitive name. As with every entrepreneurial venture, the first ones to be introduced to the experience were their friends, who as newcomers in the city turned out not to be a lot: six people attended a small dinner in Leif’s small courtyard. Pasta, they recall, “was horrible”, but their friends didn’t seem to mind and were willing to keep participating in the experiment in exchange for a suggested donation. They worried, however, that the experience might be limited to the people they knew. “I remember that after we invited the ten people we each knew in Denmark we were like ‘Shit, how are we gonna grow this? We don’t know anyone’. And I remember like both of us being well, I guess would just do another one”.As the pasta got better, so did the turnout, friends brought their friends and the referral kept growing until one of those dinners they looked around and realized there was no one among the guests they knew. “That was not hard as we don’t know a lot of people here”, states Jorge, but the invitation to eat garbage grew on people. In a year, they went from feeding six of their close friends to charge a modest amount of 65 to 99 DKK, to giving away one thousand pasta bowls for free.
Pasta that made of bread.Photos: taken from @eatwasted Instagram page
More and more people join in the event. Photos: taken from @eatwasted Instagram page
But how does this trendy initiative actually help prevent food waste on a large scale?
After receiving just one response out of 30 emails to bakeries, bakeries are now the ones reaching out to them to get involved. Besides small businesses they are also working with manufacturing bakeries that sell to grocery stores: “maybe they waste like two to five percent, but they’re in 500 grocery stores. So that becomes a lot of bread”, Leif says.
When it comes to making numbers of how much bread they have saved from being wasted in the last year, they’re honest to say that as much as this is a growing interest for them they haven’t made numbers. In raw, Jorge calculates that they make like 20-22 kilograms of pasta per dinner, which now hosts around 150 guests. “Is that accurate?”, he asks Leif. “Yeah, maybe there’s even like five kilograms of bread weight we saved but then like the big dinner was maybe like, I think 800 pieces of bread”, Leif replies. As they wish they could use more upcycle products in their events, bread remains the main donated ingredient, but not the only one. Recently they reached an agreement with a farm close to their headquarters that allows them to collect second-tier mushrooms that restaurants don’t want.
In any case, as the hangout dinners are the most visible part of what Eat Waste does, it’s not the center of the operation Leif and Jorge run. “Our business model is not really to make events. It’s really that we’re gonna produce pasta and sell it to other people and scale that and have an impact within this one kind of specific narrow chain. The events are just a way for us to build community and tell the story”, Leif claims. Besides saving bread from being wasted and helping reduce the carbon food print, Eat Waste donates part of what they produce and part of the earnings from the events to non-profits feeding those in need, such as World Central Kitchen. On March 10, 2023, for example, they raised 2,600 DKK to “provide warm and nourishing meals to the earthquake victims in Syria and Turkey”, as one of their posts on Instagram states.
Posters of one of the pasta parties.Photos: taken from @eatwasted Instagram page
Will pasta bowls be enough to reduce gas emissions? Leif and Jorge are sure it won’t. Their mission is not to save the world one bowl at a time but to change people’s mindset about eating trash. “We need to almost make it look cool and desirable to eat garbage if this is going to shift because ultimately consumers might say they care about the environment. Still, I think that they pursue and purchase desirable things.”