Plate Up for Glasgow – Reviewed by Amy Glasgow @theglasgowdiet
Over 35 Glasgow hospitality venues have teamed up for the Plate Up For Glasgow campaign, launching October 12. The campaign challenges hospitality venues to reduce their food waste and reduce their impact on climate change ahead of COP26.
Diners can now book any of the participating venues and sample their sustainable Food Hero dishes and drinks between the 12th October and 12th November. Each venue has created either a dish or a drink that hits one of four key food waste briefs created by the Plate Up campaign. These are:
- Rethinking existing menu items to reduce waste
- Showcasing food preservation techniques such as pickling, drying or curing
- Using unfashionable cuts of meat or vegetables
- Creating a dish from surplus waste or donated food
On Monday, the Plate Up For Glasgow showcase at Drygate Brewery saw nine of the participating venues preview their dishes, with talks from Campaign Lead Rebecca Ricketts and Eusebi Deli owner and founder, Giovanna Eusebi.
Rebecca Ricketts said: “Food waste currently costs the Scottish hospitality industry approximately £212 million annually and is recognised to be a bigger cause of climate change than plastics. Through Plate Up for Glasgow, we hope to bring the industry together, giving them a better chance of rebuilding post-pandemic whilst learning collaboratively how to become sustainable and profitable for the future.”
For the duration of the campaign, venues including Eusebi Deli, Sprigg, The Duke’s Umbrella, Drygate Brewery, The Finniestion, The Broken Pony, Porter & Rye and many more will be offering diners one ‘Low Waste’ dish, which meets one of the above criteria. Dishes include a delicious humble cauliflower salad from Eusebi Deli, which uses every part of the vegetable, from the stalk to the leaves, a zingy szechuan pickled cucumber stalk salad from Sprigg, and even a zero-waste beer from Drygate, brewed using surplus ‘waste’ bread which acts as an aid to fermentation.
The hope is that this campaign will encourage the hospitality industry to continue thinking about the small ways they can reduce their food waste and create dishes that are not only low-waste, but tasty and profitable too.
For diners trying the dishes, hopefully it will encourage them to go home and think about their own food waste. Are you regularly throwing away vegetable peels or broccoli stalks? Is there something you could do to avoid throwing them away? What about turning your peels into crunchy crisps by baking them in the oven with some seasoning? After sampling Sprigg’s szechuan pickled broccoli stalks, it’s something I’m definitely going to consider in the future!
As the campaign’s lead hospitality partner, Giovanna Eusebi perfectly summerised the aim of Plate Up For Glasgow when she said: “I hear people saying ‘I’m just one restaurant, one bar, one home, how can I make a difference?’ I’m reminded of one of our chefs, Mark Robertson, who said ‘Giovanna, if we just make one small change each day, that will be 365 changes in one year’. So, when the idea of Plate Up for Glasgow started, it made sense that the stapline would be: ‘Making a difference, one dish at a time’. It’s not just one dish, one drink, it’s every person in your venue that you can touch, educate and inspire.”
Want to find out more about the campaign? To book one of the venues and to find tips and tricks on how to reduce food waste at home, visit https://plateupforglasgow.co.uk/
