Zero-Waste Community Kitchens Turn Scraps into Flavor-Packed Dishes

Yves here. While I imagine most of you are careful to avoid personal food waste, this post described how items we often toss in food prep can be used in recipes. And it is clever to make restaurants the front line of these practices, since they often toss a lot of ingredients as it is. Here, the restaurants serve as training centers, which not only helps spread their optimal cooking philosophy and create communities, but on a mundane level, but likely improve the visibility and popularity of these restaurants.

However, approaches like the one below assume having time to cook, as opposed to very minimal meal prep. A big reason Americans eat so much fast food is time poverty. In other words, this sort of training is highly valuable both from a budgetary and a planetary-health perspective…..for those in a position to take advantage of it.

By Luis Alexis Rodríguez-Cruz, a social scientist and writer who covers food, the environment, science, and policy. On every Sunday, Luis Alexis cooks and publishes La Fiambrera, a newsletter where he writes about social, cultural, and scientific topics related to Puerto Rico’s food systems. You can find his bylines in NextCity, El Nuevo Día, among others, and his research in several scientific journals. Originally published at Yale Climate Connections

Adeli Llanos arrived at the Virgen del Rosario Community Kitchen in Lima, Peru, as the soft summer morning light was still moving through the space. Alongside the other cooks, she began cleaning the facility before preparing the lunch menu.

On that day, she helped cook locro de zapallo – a traditional dish made with squash and other vegetables – with fried eggs, as well as the house soup, using techniques she learned in training sessions that have helped reduce the amount of food discarded as waste.

The training sessions are hosted by an organization named CCORI (pronounced “hori”), which comes from a Quechua word meaning “gold,” reflecting how the organization views food in all its parts: as something valuable.

Founded by engineer Anyell Sanmiguel and research chef Palmiro Ocampo, CCORI promotes food sustainability through optimal cooking, a methodology that trains people in culinary techniques that make it possible to use all the food – preserving it, recycling it, and adding value to all its parts.

For example, the trainings highlight the nutritional value of citrus peels – such as lemons,mandarins, and oranges – and how they can be processed and used in various dishes.

“It was surprising to realize how much we were wasting. Seeing that every product you buy at the market is useful – from the seeds to the pulp to the peel, all of it – is exciting,” Llanos said, speaking in Spanish like everyone interviewed for this story.

Peru, while a source of tremendous food biodiversity, is the Latin American country with the highest levels of food insecurity and one where more than 50% of organic waste – including food – is discarded. Globally, it is estimated that nearly one-third of food ends up in the trash.

Decomposing food contributes to methane emissions that warm our atmosphere and drive climate change. Although food loss occurs throughout the entire supply chain, the kitchen is one place where individual actions can help.

Adeli Llanos teaches a cooking class. (Image credit: Adeli Llanos)

In the community kitchens that have worked with CCORI, the word “waste” is no longer used to describe food. They do everything possible to reduce this problem while also helping to feed their communities.

“Cooking more with less was what we were looking for. The training helped us a great deal to use the product 100%,” said Llanos, who is also a workshop facilitator with CCORI.

She said she’s received positive feedback from diners when she prepares salads using vegetable peels and makes drinks from fruit rinds – parts of food she did not use before.

“I feel proud of what we’re doing and of what we’re teaching,” said Anita Clemente, a cook at La Amistad Community Kitchen who also leads training sessions. “It really excites me to be able to step forward and share knowledge; I used to be someone who couldn’t speak in public.”

Both women were trained through CCORI’s Cocinas Bondadosas, or Kind Kitchens program, which has already trained more than 300 women in more than 20 community kitchens in Lima. Through the sharing of culinary techniques and ancestral, gastronomic, and scientific knowledge, CCORI has succeeded in reducing food loss in the kitchen – the place that is almost always at the very end of the supply chain.

The Value of the Whole Food

When I visited Lima during the summer of 2025, I went to lunch at the CCORI restaurant that had recently opened. I ate a dish made using all parts of the broccoli, featuring florets and shoots topped with crispy leaves, a sea of greens and textures over a creamy base made from the stalk. I also enjoyed a dish made from preserves, including fruit seeds and vegetable peels used in other dishes.

“The message we want to convey to people is that food has value in every one of its parts. That value is demonstrated by turning it into something delicious – because the mechanism has to work to carry the message,” Palmiro Ocampo said. “By using every part, you avoid generating waste because each part is an extra ingredient, and the product itself is a complete recipe that can be created from a single ingredient.”

When he and the CCORI team went to the La Amistad Community Kitchen to give a workshop, Clemente at first thought it was going to be a traditional, recipe-based class.

“When they started explaining how they used food peels and how those nutrients we were throwing in the trash could actually nourish us – how we could make use of them – it was very impressive to me,” Clemente said. “Because when we go to the market and buy a vegetable, they weigh everything – you pay for it, peel and all. And what do we do? We get to the kitchen, peel it, remove the seeds and the skin, and throw them away. And what were we throwing away? Money,” she said.

Many of the recipes and knowledge shared in these workshops are available in two Spanish-language recipe books published online.

The workshops have helped participants recognize their agency in the food system.

“Sometimes consumers may have very little impact on how to control those things, but where you can exercise control as a final consumer is in how you handle food,” Sanmiguel said. “In the end, this is one of the most important stages, because energy, land, and water have already been used for that food to reach your hands. It is at this final stage where we truly have to honor the food that has come into our hands.”

The Exchange of Knowledge Strengthens Support Cetworks

In addition to being a source of income, the restaurant has served the CCORI team as a space for inspiration and learning. New processes continue to be developed there and are later brought into other kitchens. But this exchange is not one-way, since cooks from the community kitchens also go to CCORI to give demonstrations and take part in training sessions with the restaurant team.

“I respect them greatly,” said Ocampo, who before working full-time with CCORI had built his career in Peru’s fine-dining scene. “A really beautiful dynamic takes place. You might have a cook from Le Cordon Bleu, for example, who has worked in different fine-dining restaurants and is now working at CCORI and then meets Adeli Llanos, who knows things he doesn’t, despite all his experience.”

A Space for Change

CCORI’s restaurant has also encouraged other restaurants in the city to pay attention to reducing the amount of food that ends up in the trash. Others have joined in to collaborate and support the organization’s programs. In 2025, they even trained the team at the Gustu restaurant in La Paz, Bolivia, in the creation of similar programs.

“The dream would be that we wouldn’t even need to call it ‘optimal’ cooking – that there would be a paradigm shift,” Ocampo said.