Bufalina Prepares Meal Made of Food Waste for SXSW Eco

At a private event that the Rockefeller Foundation and The Huffington Post hosted last month to mark the first day of SXSW Eco week in Austin, Texas, local restaurant Bufalina prepared a special meal of appetizers, pastas and pizzas made with produce that would otherwise have been tossed in the compost or trash.

The recipes included overgrown kale stems and stunted spinach with yellowed edges, for example, Bufalina owner Steven Dilley told HuffPost. He had specifically reached out to local farms to retrieve vegetables they would have thrown away.

“It’s perfectly edible food ― it’s just aesthetically, it might not look beautiful,” Dilley says in the video above. “We look at the appearance of a vegetable, but many times that bears very little relationship to taste.”