The pursuit of a zero-waste restaurant proved noble, but also chaotic and brutal. In his book Silo, The Zero Waste Blueprint, there are numerous tales of chaos, of the restaurant nearly burning down, of McMaster sleeping on the restaurant floor and not leaving the premises for weeks on end. It was brave, uncompromising – diners were greeted with a large compost machine as a bold statement of intent – and by his own account incredibly difficult to do, often overwhelmingly so. At Silo in Brighton, which he launched in 2014 and closed in June this year, McMaster has (in)famously strived to create and run a restaurant that tackles head on the thorny issue of the vast amount of waste generated in the world of hospitality. Those who know of McMaster, who is leading a one-man crusade against waste in restaurants, will be familiar with this approach. In Silo’s ‘closed loop’ system there is no such thing as a by-product, just another product.
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Ingredients are delivered free of disposable packaging food is cooked, served and eaten with any absolutely necessary leftovers turned into either green or brown compost glass wine bottles are reduced to powder and turned into ‘porcelain’. Like its previous incarnation in Brighton, which closed earlier this year after half a decade to make way for the new project, nothing in Silo is thrown away.Īnd McMaster means nothing.
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This might appear a minor observation, but from this seemingly simple premise has grown the UK’s – if not the world’s – first zero-waste restaurant. There will be no bin in Douglas McMaster’s new restaurant, Silo, when it opens in Hackney in November.
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“There has to be an alternative way of creating meat.” “Meat production right now is not sustainable,” Selvaganapathy says. The researchers were inspired by the meat-supply crisis in which worldwide demand is growing while current meat consumption is straining land and water resources and generating troubling levels of greenhouse gases. There is no reason to think the same technology would not work for growing beef, pork or chicken, and the model would lend itself well to large-scale production, Selvaganapathy says. “It felt and tasted just like meat,” says Selvaganapathy. Though they did not eat the mouse meat described in the research paper, they later made and cooked a sample of meat they created from rabbit cells.
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“Consumers will be able to buy meat with whatever percentage of fat they like – just like they do with milk.”Īs they describe in the journal Cells Tissues Organs, the researchers proved the concept by making meat from available lines of mouse cells. “We are creating slabs of meat,” he says.
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The layers can be stacked into a solid piece of any thickness, Selvaganapathy says, and “tuned” to replicate the fat content and marbling of any cut of meat – an advantage over other alternatives. The sheets naturally bond to one another before the cells die. The sheets of living cells, each about the thickness of a sheet of printer paper, are first grown in culture and then concentrated on growth plates before being peeled off and stacked or folded together. The technique is adapted from a method used to grow tissue for human transplants. Researchers Ravi Selvaganapathy and Alireza Shahin-Shamsabadi, both of the university’s School of Biomedical Engineering, have devised a way to make meat by stacking thin sheets of cultivated muscle and fat cells grown together in a lab setting. McMaster researchers have developed a new form of cultivated meat using a method that promises more natural flavour and texture than other alternatives to traditional meat from animals.