Bruised tomatoes, cauliflower stems, orange peels—what we dismiss, Arina Suchde wants you to begin redeeming. In this excerpt from The No-Waste Kitchen Cookbook, she makes a case for our everyday food scraps as the beginnings of a meal, not its discard.
Arina Suchde didn’t set out to become a champion of zero-waste cooking. Trained as a chef and bartender in Mumbai, her experiments began in her home kitchen—slipping potato skins into the oven, steeping pineapple rinds into syrup, turning orange peels into something more than garnish. What started as curiosity became practice, and practice became a philosophy.
The No-Waste Kitchen Cookbook is the distillation of that journey. Featuring 75 recipes and smart, practical hacks, the book guides readers to cook imaginatively. Think pomegranate skin teas, stem stir-fries, and clever peel-infused cocktails—recipes that surprise in their thrift as much as in their flavour.
Written in fluid, easy-to-read prose, this handbook carries a simple message from Arina: waste is not an inevitability of modern life, but a habit we can unlearn.
Read an excerpt from ‘The No-Waste Kitchen Cookbook’:
IMPERFECT PRODUCE IS GOOD. Most of us tend to select perfect-looking fruits and vegetables, but, in fact, bruises, discolouration, odd shapes and sizes do not impact nutritional value. It is purely for aesthetic reasons, which should not be a factor since the produce is going to be cut up and eaten anyway and will not be put on display like a work of art! In looking for the perfect tomato, apple, plum or carrot, we forget that the ones left behind most likely end up in the trash and translate into financial loss for the farmer and/or the seller. Also, being perfectly edible, it is produce that could have gone to someone who really needed it. Rejected produce contributes to around 30 percent waste at the farm level and, as food goes down the supply chain, so much more is lost due to improper handling and storage.
Once we have the produce, how can we make the most of it? When we hear the term ‘food waste’, our mind goes straight to leftover food from the previous meal. But wastage begins at the preparation stage itself, in the form of parts we end up discarding because we do not think they are edible or we do not know what to do with them. In my research, I found that almost 33 per cent of food waste at home comprises peels and trimmings. Therefore, USE EVERYTHING, EVEN PEELS AND CORES.
You will be surprised to know that many of the discarded parts have more nutrients than the actual fruit or vegetable itself or, in some cases, are just better in taste and texture. If something cannot actually be eaten, it often has great flavours and health benefits that can be extracted before it is discarded. Potato peels are not used most of the time, even though they are so easy to cook; orange and lemon rind requires a bit of processing before being used in a recipe to improve the texture and get rid of the bitterness. Seeds and stems of many fruits and vegetables can be used in various dishes, and peels of some fruits such as pineapple and pomegranate can be used to make beverages even though they cannot be eaten.
Not just that, this way you also get your money’s worth. Imagine buying a kilo of oranges for juice when just the peels account for about 600 grams, or a kilo of cauliflower where you lose around 120–200 grams when you throw the stems and leaves away. It is an exercise worth doing in your kitchen to see how much food is trashed before it even reaches your plates. Generations before us did not have the luxury of access to food the way we do today, not only in terms of quantity but also variety. We have access to ingredients from around the world and find seasonal ingredients throughout the year. They made the most of what they had; nothing went to waste.
ALL INEDIBLE FOOD IS NOT WASTE. If they knew it was edible, it was used in cooking. Things that were inedible found other uses around the house or could be fed to animals. Very little ended up in the bin. Our generation seems to have forgotten such practices or does not have the time and bandwidth to think about them in our fast-paced lives. Using all possible
parts of fruits and vegetables is not a new concept or fad; it has been the norm in many cultures around the world for decades, India included. It is the need of the hour to learn and practise reducing waste from our homes and kitchens. The trick is not to look at it as waste, but instead think of it as a new ingredient and treat it like you would some exotic vegetable or fruit that you came across while shopping or saw online in a blog or video. Find creative ways of incorporating it into your daily cooking routine, learn more about the nutritional value and health benefits and calculate how much money you save in the process.
This excerpt is from ‘The No-Waste Kitchen Cookbook: 75 Recipes to Begin Your Zero-Waste Journey’ by Arina Suchde published in 2023 (HarperCollins India). Excerpted with permission from the author and the publisher.
Arina Suchde is a Mumbai-based chef, mixologist, and cookbook author with over a decade of experience in the food and beverage industry. Trained in India, London, and New York, she has led workshops, taught in schools, and collaborated widely, championing a kitchen philosophy rooted in creativity and zero-waste cooking.
Continue your no-waste journey with a few of our favourite recipes from Arina’s The No-Waste Kitchen Cookbook here.
But during monsoons and in humid weather, the house would be filled with a peculiar smell of wet meat. Crows, cats and dogs constantly circled the area because of the smell.
