UNCOVERING HIDDEN GEMS: A JOURNEY THROUGH LONDON'S FORGOTTEN FEASTS

You have to know where to look. Tucked away in London’s hectic streets, it’s not the palaces and museums – familiar from the postcards – that hold the key to a gastronomic adventure, but the blue plastic bags and polystyrene boxes that emerge from the thousands of eateries around the city. It’s an expedition for the green-minded, the food-curious – and anyone with a stomach for punishment. Welcome to my week eating what others throw away.

DISCOVER A NEW WAY TO DINE

At the heart of this little adventure is a Danish app on which people – it has amassed an income of more than 700 million DKK (almost £80 million) since its inception in 2016 – that’s every day in the UK last year. It’s called Too Good To Go (TGTG) and, naturally, the model lends itself well to my gastronomic experiment: its aim is to salvage the food that would otherwise be thrown away in restaurants and supermarkets, so that, in theory, I should be paying very little for my meals, which could have stories of sustainability and innovation attached to them. My brief – to scale back my weekly food budget and take a couple of culinary adventures – will be to use the TGTGB and let it pick a restaurant somewhere in London each week.

THE MORNING SURPRISE: BREAKFAST AT NOVOTEL

My ‘journey’ started in the lobby of the Novotel Hotel by the River Thames, breakfast provided (for a paltry sum, thanks to TGTG) from a buffet offering everything from full English to teeny-tiny pastries. This, then, was TGTG’s potential: to straddle the gap between the low and the high, between the subsidised and the Michelin-starred. Making fine dining democratic.

DISCOVER THE BREADTH OF LONDON'S CUISINE

The days began to bleed into one another as I searched, in the finest hotels and cafés, at markets and street-food stalls, discovering places willing to deviate from perfect specs, awash with flavours, and keen to avoid waste: every last bite was a keeper. My haul included the black end of a loaf of sourdough along with Caribbean flavours, two sides of London’s culinary personality.

THE TECH BEHIND THE TASTE

Peeling away the roofing material, it becomes clear that the talk about TGTG is not only about an app, but about a movement rooted in sustainability and ingenuity. The app is the brainchild of two Danish entrepreneurs. Their aim is one of sustainability and greenhouse gas reduction. Every meal saved is a step towards reducing the adverse effects of climate change. Can this be the future of food, a symbiotic dance between technology, taste and responsibility?

DISCOVER THE COMMUNITY SPIRIT

Alongside all those restaurants and Mystery Boxes is the little bit of community spirit that binds users, restaurants and food lovers in the common cause of stopping waste – and every Wowshee’s falafel stall that opens is a reminder that every little helps.

THE REALITY OF FOOD WASTE

But this trip was not all reflection, and part of me always felt a bit uncomfortable. There seemed to be a close interaction between discovering food and reducing waste, but which one was actually doing what? Could an app really make a dent in the food waste problem, or are they just talking about it changing the world while others get on with the real work?

DISCOVER: THE ESSENCE OF IMPACT

What TGTG highlights is the potential for waste-reduction and food-finding to take place together, not only in the same place, but as part of the same social experience. Instead of listening to the voice of a sushi chef, diners can hear how all of the dishes were found. Instead of dining in complete silence, they can participate in a conversation about food waste. Instead of feeling like a mere user of a waste-management system, they can become part of a network of people trying to build more sustainable practices. This isn’t the end of the story, however. As Cicero suggested so many years ago, we must not simply question, but go on to explore and ultimately find out.

By the end of this gustatory journey, there’s one thing you can’t help but discover: the real story, the more interesting story, the innovations and struggles that keep the food we overlook on our tables for us every day, are not found in the bells and whistles of the fancy banquet tables. They are found in the food itself, the circumstances surrounding its creation, in the forgotten banquet all around us, right now. In its food, its people, its time and place, TGTG has opened up a trail of meals for all of us, for now and into the future, to find those forgotten banquets, reconsider our narrative of waste, and rediscover our place in the ecosystem of food. This article was adapted by permission from the Aeon website, where it was originally published.