LEFT Most dishes at The Plot have some element (kimchi, sauce) made of perfectly good food (rinds, stems) that most restaurants discard. ABOVE Jessica and Davin Waite at their small vegetable garden behind the restaurant. RIGHT The Plot is part of the scene in South Oceanside, a thriving, largely local part of town.
(regenerative farms forego fertilizers and pesticides in lieu of tactics like biodiversity and compositing, doing everything they can to build super-soil through natural processes, and sequestering carbon into the soil rather than in our atmosphere), and subsidizing with plants from their on-site garden. The list of The Plot’s Earth-first practices is astounding and requires a biblical scroll, but Jessica Waite says they divert 100 percent of waste from landfills. Nothing ends up in the trash, and much less than 1 percent of food product they bring in-house is discarded (industry standard is 4 to 10 percent). Other measures include: making all meat substitutes in house (avoiding monocrops); leftover rice is sent to local refinery, Kismet, which turns it into rice syrup for salad dressings; tofu whey becomes caramel; pulp from stock is dried into powder for their mac & chorizö; mushroom scraps are dried and smoked to create the desirable “funk” of their house-made cheese; beet scraps become ketchup; to-go boxes are compostable. Plant-based food is gaining steam for a few pretty simple reasons, including: health (overeating steak is more harmful than overeating squash), because Billie
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