Dan Barber Designs Sustainable “Veggie Scrap” Salad

Manhattan’s favorite vegetable-focused institution Sweetgreen (which according to Well + Good “has been taking over the city one neighborhood at a time—from Tribeca to Williamsburg”) is collaborating with Dan Barber’s sustainability project WastED to design a salad made from the veggie scraps that often get thrown out during culinary prep.

The WastED Salad is inspired by Barber’s Blue Hill restaurant salad repertoire and includes roasted bread butts, carrot peels, discarded kale pieces, and broccoli stalks. At a retail price of $8.60, a portion of its proceeds will benefit the “food rescue” nonprofit City Harvest. The salad will be available on Sweetgreen menus from today through Monday, September 28.

“The wastED salad is very much in the spirit of the original pop-up,” Barber told Edible Manhattan. “More often than not, the foods we consider ‘waste’ — be it a broccoli leaf or a cabbage core — all have delicious applications.” The salad itself is as seasonal as the “seasonal late summer menu” that is currently running at Sweetgreen’s New York City locations. As a result, the “uncelebrated” produce used in the salad is equally-seasonal.

Earlier this year, Blue Hill restaurant in Greenwich Village temporarily reinvented itself as wastED, a pop-up devoted to the theme of food waste and re-use. WastED collaborated with local farmers, fishermen, distributors, processors, plant breeders, producers, restaurants and retailers, reconcieving “waste” that occurs at every link in the food chain by transforming it– with the help of seasoned chefs– into desirable, inventive dishes. Now, Barber’s “sustainable salad” is bringing this same ingenuity to the masses– this time with a garden vegetable focus.

Watch Dan Barber talk about the “Sustainable Salad” on Sweetgreen Presents: