Top Hong Kong Chefs Team Up with HKU, Food Waste App to Unveil Sustainable Cookbook

The University of Hong Kong, sustainability charity Green Hospitality, and food-saving app Chomp, have launched a cookbook to tackle food waste in the city.

From cucumber peel and tofu tzatziki to overripe tomato miso soup, a new climate-conscious cookbook is looking to take on Hong Kong’s food waste epidemic.

The effort is a collaboration between the University of Hong Kong’s (HKU) School of Biological Sciences, sustainable hospitality non-profit GREEN Hospitality, and local food-saving app Chomp. The project aims to highlight the potential of overlooked, nutritious food scraps via their Food Waste to Good Taste initiative.

In its third year, the campaign led to the creation of Conscious Cooking – Asian Delights, a book featuring recipes from nine of Hong Kong’s leading chefs, as well as Chomp and HKU students.

“This cookbook serves as an invitation to rethink how we view food waste, to see potential where others see trash, and to savour the delicious possibilities that lie within,” said Prof Jetty Chung-Yung Lee, a senior lecturer of food and nutritional science at HKU.

Why food waste is a critical climate issue in Hong Kong

Food waste is a major environmental issue, and one of the easiest ways to shrink one’s climate footprint. “The entire life-cycle of uneaten food creates emissions, from its production, to transport, to storage, preparation, and ultimate disposal,” Sara Burnett, executive director of non-profit ReFED, told Green Queen in February.

“When food ends up in a landfill, a greenhouse gas called methane is produced – and this has a warming potential 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide when we measure over a 20-year period,” she added. “Keeping food out of landfills could avoid methane emissions equivalent to taking 16 million cars off the road.”

According to climate action non-profit Project Drawdown, following plant-rich diets and reducing food waste are the two most impactful actions individuals can take to fight the climate crisis and lower personal GHG emissions.

Globally, a third of all food is wasted, resulting in up to 10% of all emissions (five times greater than the aviation industry). Asia is responsible for half of the world’s total food waste.

In Hong Kong alone, over 3,400 tonnes of food go to landfill every day, making up 30% of the city’s total municipal waste. However, only a fraction of this is recycled, going against Hong Kong’s plan to reduce emissions by 26-36% by 2030 (from a 2005 baseline).

As is the case globally, a majority of this waste comes from Hong Kong households. Around 22% is sourced from restaurants, hotels and other hospitality businesses.

This doesn’t bode well for the third of the population who are suffering from food insecurity. Around 7.5 million people reside in the city and eat an average of 2.85kg of food each day. Roughly calculated, the amount of food that goes to waste could feed nearly 1.2 million of its residents – that’s almost equivalent to all Hong Kongers living under the poverty line.

Experts suggest that many residents and restaurants are slow to recycle food waste due to a lack of incentives and practical guidelines, though authorities have been making efforts to improve waste collection and recycling.

“Since discovering that much of the food so regularly discarded from Hong Kong households is brimming with potential, we’ve been determined to find ways in which these overlooked ingredients can be repurposed – not just to reduce waste, but to create something meaningful and beneficial for human health,” explained Lee.

Food waste cookbook spotlights most common food scraps

Enter the Conscious Cooking – Asian Delights cookbook. Audits and analysis by Green Hospitality and HKU found nine kitchen scraps that are often discarded, but can boost the nutritional value of a meal. These include cucumber peels, leek tops, leftover cooked pasta and rice, lemon peels, onion skins, overripe cherry tomatoes, potato peels, and tea leaves.

These scraps form the base of recipes from nine chefs, including Barkada’s Jen Balisi, Soho House Hong Kong’s Krzysztof Czerwinski, Little Bao’s May Chow, and Whey’s Barry Quek.

Dishes include Indian-inspired curd rice made from leftover rice by Samaira Kavatkar (The Bombay East Indian Girl), dry asam noodles with lemon peels by Quek, and a mapo spaghetti with leftover pasta by Yurakucho’s Joey Chan.

The cookbook is available as an e-book or a hardcover, with all profits donated to Foodlink Foundation, a local charity fighting hunger in low-income and marginalized communities and helping cut food waste in the Hong Kong’s hospitality industry.

The Food Waste to Good Taste initiative, meanwhile, began in 2022 with educational and student innovation seminars to raise awareness about Hong Kong’s food waste problem. The project has since evolved to include hands-on workshops for F&B practitioners, providing them with practical skills and knowledge to lower waste.

“Hong Kong spends a lot of money on food that goes to waste, which just means that resources and capital are being tied up on redundant processes and products that aren’t used or consumed. Think about the produce, the delivery, and the processing of the waste,” Chomp founder and CEO Carla Martinesi told Green Queen last year, following an event spotlighting rescued food.

“It’s also about social equity,” she added. “In a city like Hong Kong, where rent is sky-high and poverty and food insecurity exist, it feels paradoxical to have significantly high levels of food waste when you have people a lot closer than you probably realise who need help.”