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A letter from Bluedot Living Kitchen’s editor.
Frankie Drogin grew up in the Phillipines, a country with high levels of poverty that has developed a culture that abhors food waste. “When I was growing up,” Frankie told Bluedot writer Laura D. Roosevelt, “I’d watch my mom throw out just a tiny bag of trash every day, because she used everything when she cooked.”
With pig dishes (which they call pig, not pork), she says they ate the entire pig. Sisig, a popular bar food eaten with beer, contains assorted pig parts (ears, snouts) chopped into little pieces, fried with other spices, and served sizzling.
When I first read about sisig, I thought back to a meal my father’s Greek mother used to make — mageiritsa, an Easter soup made from lambs’ brains. Another dish created in a culture that looked down on wasting a single bit of an animal someone had raised to eat.
My own mother — never one to waste anything — had cultivated a relationship with my non-English-speaking yiayia by learning to cook the dishes she loved. But she stopped at lamb’s brain soup. My grandmother did not slaughter lambs in her backyard (though she did use up every inch there growing greens), so making the dish wasn’t so much about not wasting food as maintaining a cultural tradition. Mageiritsa reportedly tasted like one of my favorite Greek soups, avgolemono, rich with dill, lemon, and orzo. I’ll never know, because I also passed it up.
Avoiding food waste, as you may have read in the pages of the Bluedot Living Kitchen magazine before, is one of the most impactful things we can do to lower our carbon footprints. That 30%-plus of food wasted in the U.S. accounts for about 10% of global food emissions. So aside from helping to spare the planet more CO2, not wasting food can save you money.
Fear not, though — there are so many ways to avoid food waste that don’t involve using up lambs’ brains or pigs’ snouts — dive in and find out! (By the way, our sisig switched out the pig parts for mushrooms.)
– Jamie Kageleiry (and Emily Cain and Nicki Miller)
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