Restaurants: Taste makes waste

Even as residents struggle to cope with rocketing food prices, tonnes of food is going to waste at restaurants and hotels in Dubai.

According to leading chefs and restaurant owners, this, sadly, is happening every day. “As unfortunate as it is, food gets thrown away at restaurants around the world. It’s a pity because there are a lot of hungry people in the world. But when you are in a country with climate like the UAE, you can’t reuse the food due top safety reasons,” said Uwe Micheel, Director of Kitchens, Radisson SAS Hotel.

The hotel has 11 restaurants on its premises alone.

He said that many restaurants in town used to allow their staff to consume leftover food, but that is not a common practice any more.

“In most cases, the food can only be kept for three hours, after which it is not fit for consumption and must be thrown away,” said Uwe, adding that about 10 per cent of the buffet spread is left unused daily, with most of it is disposed of to the hotel’s compactor (a type of refuse collection vessel).

The waste is collected twice daily by the municipality or private agencies. These agencies then transport the food to various landfills.

One waste management firm collects discarded food waste from 30 per cent of hotels in Dubai. “We collect approximately 3500 cubic metres of domestic waste every day,” said a representative of the company. Food makes up a large quantity of this waste, although the firm could not specify the exact proportion.

“A total of 20-30 per cent of this waste is sent for recycling, while the rest is disposed of at Jebel Ali and Al Qusais municipality landfills,” said Reena.

Due the perceived sensitive nature of the subject, some hotels declined to share their numbers on daily food waste, while others chose not to respond, when contacted by XPRESS.

Patrick Lannes, Chef Director of Grosvenor House and Le Royal Meridien Beach Resort & Spa Dubai said, “We do some recycling, but due to health and safety rules by the government, we have to destroy leftover food daily.”

He said that “food at buffets is discarded after two hours due to health, safety and hygiene reasons”, adding that “we try to calculate (in advance) just to avoid food wastage”. He declined to comment on how much food was actually being destroyed every day, saying it was a “sensitive subject” and that it was the “problem of the world”.

And this is not the case with top-end restaurants alone.

Medium and budget restaurants too follow the practice of throwing away copious quantities of food on a daily basis. Cooks at some of the budget and medium-range restaurants in Dubai, speaking on condition on anonymity, admitted to throwing away upwards of 40kg of food every day.

While most pointed out stringent food and safety laws as the reason for rubbishing food, other reasons included lack of involvement of charity organisations and the pride of people who rejected the idea of consuming food discarded by restaurants.