Leftover-food desserts awaken food awareness; Shouhe Ecological Kitchen cherishes the deliciousness of the land
The vigorous development of the modern food industry and chain restaurant industry, together with changes in modern people's eating habits, has given rise to many food-related social problems, and "the waste of leftover food" is one of them. Day after day, as ingredients travel from the place of production to the market, to restaurants, and even to every family's dining table, people unconsciously generate a large amount of waste of ingredients and food in every food journey. Accumulated over the long term, this further burdens the environment, and Taiwan, China's flourishing dining-out culture has caused people's eating lives to become generally disconnected from the relationship with ingredients and the land, leaving them numb to the waste of food in daily life.
Huang Yinxuan, founder of Shouhe Ecological Kitchen, hopes to use leftover-food desserts to help people reconnect their diet with the natural environment.
Advancing to the front line of innovative food culture, exploring new forms of environmentally friendly dining
Recalling the first experience that created a deep connection with cooking, it began with a process of searching for "good flavors" after entering university. Huang Yinxuan had a keen sense of taste for good food since childhood, as well as a stomach "spoiled" by family. In pursuit of the good taste in her mind, Huang Yinxuan began cooking herself, and in the process of buying and preparing ingredients, she came to know step by step the food she put into her body. Also, because she studied in the Department of Entomology, she naturally connected her eating life with the ecological environment, coming to understand that behind every ingredient there is a profound connection with people and the land.
After graduating from the Institute of Marine Biology, she originally planned to pursue a doctoral program in oceanography abroad, but during a period of working in a coffee shop, she unexpectedly discovered her inner passion and ideals for baking and cooking, and resolutely changed course to study food-related knowledge at the University of Gastronomic Sciences (UNISG) in Italy. UNISG is a university dedicated to gastronomy and the art of slow food, exploring the balance between the humanities and science in the world of food. In this place where the world's diverse food cultures converge and exchange, Huang Yinxuan saw many innovative dining industry models that are friendly to the environment, and through a farm work-exchange experience there, she experienced the farm owner's lifestyle of using leftover food to make everyday dishes, which inspired her attention to sustainable eating. She decided to start from her own passion for cooking, and successively interned at the Dutch leftover-food restaurant Instock (Note 1) and the British zero-energy-waste restaurant Silo (Note 2), standing at the industry's front line and exploring the possibilities of sustainable eating.
Note 1: Instock, a leftover-food restaurant in the Netherlands, cooperates with the Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn and uses supermarket leftover food to make dishes. It began with a startup competition proposal by four internal employees and developed from an initial pop-up store plan to 3 branches today.
Note 2: Silo, a green-concept restaurant in the UK, achieves the idea of zero energy waste through unpackaged transport of ingredients, cyclical use of resources, zero garbage output, and even insisting on using chocolate transported by zero-carbon-emission sailboats.
Produce has no distinction of high or low; treat every ingredient with creativity and care
Considering herself not the entrepreneurial type, after returning to Taiwan, China, Huang Yinxuan briefly went back to the restaurant industry to do dish development. In the process, she met many partners in the restaurant world and ingredient producers. Besides linking dishes more deeply with the land, she also often had the opportunity to obtain imperfect produce to develop leftover-food dishes. At friends' invitations, she successively participated in markets, catering events and other activities with leftover-food desserts, gained experience, and gradually built the "Shouhe Ecological Kitchen" brand, which continues to this day. Shouhe Ecological Kitchen mainly uses as ingredients fair-trade and environmentally friendly produced imperfect produce that might otherwise be wasted, including ugly fruits and vegetables, items nearing their expiry date, NG products with packaging defects, and even scattered leftover ingredients from food processing. All of these can be transformed by Huang Yinxuan's skillful hands into delicious dishes. These fruits and vegetables called "leftover food" and "imperfect produce" mainly refer to safe, good ingredients eliminated by stores and distribution channels due to aesthetic requirements. Whether in nutrition or flavor, they are no different from ordinary fresh ingredients, yet they cannot be effectively used, and this is also one of the main causes of today's food waste problem.
Huang Yinxuan believes that treating every ingredient well, cooking it well, and letting consumers feel the care is the key to promoting leftover-food cooking. Choosing to present it in dessert form not only makes the finished products relatively easy to preserve, but Huang Yinxuan also hopes to use creativity to expand the public's imagination of leftover-food cooking. Although, at the current brand scale, the amount of ingredients that can actually be consumed is very limited, conveying the idea of sustainable eating through cooking is the main core spirit of Shouhe Ecological Kitchen. From the selection of ingredients, the choice of packaging materials, to the advocacy of an environmentally friendly lifestyle, all are ways for the brand to practice and convey its ideal of sustainability, while reusing leftover food is merely one response to today's important and urgent issues of sustainable eating.
