Recipe for recycling: Area restaurants move beyond the usual in quest for sustainability

Published June 21, 2011 in the Commercial Appeal

These days, it's common to see the name of a farm listed next to the meat or produce on a restaurant's menu. The "Farm to Table" movement also has a flip side. What happens to the food when it leaves the table? Many restaurants -- some through Project Green Fork and some on their own -- are very conscientious about collecting compost for use back on the farm. Those that compost often employ a host of other environmentally friendly practices.

For two years, all of Sekisui Midtown's vegetable scraps went into David Lindsey's backyard. He's Sekisui's director of marketing, but he's also comfortable with the title of "Jimmy Ishii's All-Purpose Assistant." He turned the vegetable scraps into compost in a large, open-air pit in his yard and then several times a year he would load the finished compost into 5-gallon soy sauce buckets and take it back to Sekisui Midtown to give away to customers...(Read more).