The cost control course already put a price on what your kitchen throws away: a thousand pesos a month, split across five causes, found with a bucket and a clipboard. This course does not repeat that. It starts where that one stopped — with the food that is going to be left over anyway, whatever you do — and asks a different question: where does it go? The answer turns out to have a clear order, and the bin is at the bottom of it.
⚖️ Weigh it, do not price it
Convert the money into kilos once, at the start, and then work in kilos for the rest of the course. At an average food cost of around eight pesos a kilo, the example restaurant's thousand pesos a month is roughly 125 kilos of food — which, across two thousand covers, is about 62 grams per guest.
Both figures are worth having. The 125 kilos is what a member of staff carries out of the building; it is physical, visible and impossible to argue with. The 62 grams per cover is the one that survives a change in business, exactly as kilowatt-hours per cover did in the first course of this group: a busier month throws away more, and only the per-guest figure tells you whether anything actually improved.
And the split from the cost control course carries over, converted:
| Where it comes from | Roughly, per month | Can somebody still eat it? |
| Prep and trim | 33 kg | No — but some of it is an ingredient, and topic 2 is about that |
| Spoiled and out of date | 26 kg | No, once it is out of date. Before that, yes |
| Comps and mistakes | 25 kg | Rarely — it usually went to a table |
| Overproduction | 23 kg | Yes. Prepared, never served, still good |
| Remakes and returns | 19 kg | No |
Read the right-hand column, because it is the whole map of this course. Around 35 kilos a month — the overproduction plus what gets caught before it turns — is still food. The rest is material, and material has its own destinations.
🪜 The order that decides everything
There is a hierarchy, it is the same one used by everybody serious about this subject, and it is worth learning because it settles almost every argument in advance.
- Do not produce it. Always first, always cheapest, and it belongs mostly to the cost control course — prep sheets, par levels, portions — plus the two things in topic 2 that are this course's own.
- Feed people. Anything still edible goes to a person: donation, staff meal, sold at a discount before it dies. Topic 3.
- Feed animals, where local rules allow it, which varies enormously and is not a decision to improvise.
- Compost it or send it for energy, which is where the trim and the peelings belong. Topic 4.
- Landfill, which is what happens by default and is the option you are trying to make smallest.
The step everybody skips is the second one, and it is the one with the most value in it — because food that a person eats is the only outcome on the list where the food does what it was grown for. It is also the one with real rules attached, which is exactly why topic 3 opens with a warning rather than with enthusiasm.
🧭 What belongs here, and what is already written
This is the last of the three sustainability courses, and it is the one most likely to repeat another book if it is not careful.
- What waste costs you, and its five causes, is the cost control course. The log, the week with a bucket, the thousand pesos — done, and not repeated here. If you have not done it, do it there first: this course is much easier when you know your own split.
- Packaging and single-use items are the first course of this group. Here only the separation of what has already been used.
- Where food comes from is the previous course.
- Temperatures, holding times and what may be served again belong to the food safety courses. This course leans on those rules constantly and does not restate them — particularly in topic 3, where getting them wrong is not an environmental problem but a health one.
- Forecasting, so that less gets produced, is the sales analytics course.
What is genuinely this course's own is the second half of the ladder: giving food to people, composting and separating what is left, dealing with the used oil, and weighing all of it well enough to know whether any of it changed. That, and one honest observation to end on before we start.
🎯 What a small restaurant can actually change
A fifty-seat restaurant that does everything in this course perfectly diverts something like a hundred kilos a month from a bin. That is a real amount of food and a small amount of the world, and both of those are true at once.
What makes it worth doing anyway is that almost all of it is free or nearly so, and several parts of it pay for themselves through a course you have already read. Prevention is the cost control course's money. A donation arrangement costs an hour to set up and a container. Separating properly costs the price of a second bin. Only composting sometimes costs real money, and topic 4 is honest about when it does not make sense.
The one thing that does cost is attention, which is why the last topic is about the plan surviving a fortnight when you are not there. Everything in these three courses has the same failure mode: an enthusiastic start, a busy month, and a slow return to how it was — and the fix, as it has been since the kitchen course, is a checklist rather than a conviction.