Activism in the kitchen: chefs against food waste

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No two days are the same for Diego García-Vega. Despite his 24 years and his mischievous appearance, he has already lived several lives: that of a geological boy who slept holding his hammer and his most precious fossils, that of the restless adolescent who investigated the possibility of imitating natural structures to make sustainable technology or that of the university student who decided to specialize in agroecology and biodiversity to find a new way to maximize both disciplines. A tireless globetrotter, he traveled to Panama and Jamaica with United Nations programs, studied in London and worked as a researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris, until a phone call led him to another vital detour:emulate his admired Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente to star in the docuseries

, available for a few days on HBO Max.

This latest adventure began at the University College of London, where a few years ago

, an initiative with which he collected food waste from his university together with dozens of volunteers, to later distribute it in a shelter in homeless women. "Nacho Medina, producer of the series, called me shortly after the confinement to ask me if, in addition to my concerns about ecology, the food industry and the reuse of food, I liked to cook. I said yes and that's how it all started. .. ", says from the headquarters of Beta Spain, producer responsible for the format. Seven months later they were already planning the sites and projects that they wanted to highlight in the series, in which

with leading chefs from Europe as hosts. Is it a cooking show, a glimmer of hope amid so much devastating news, or something like "ecologists around the world"? It is all that and more.

The main objective of

something especially pertinent on these Christmas dates, when a huge amount of food ends up in the garbage. As the Food Waste Index prepared by the UN in March this year points out, "if food loss and waste were a country, they would be the third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. It also places a burden on systems waste management, exacerbates food insecurity and contributes to the three planetary crises of climate change: loss of biodiversity, pollution and waste. "

"We are not trying to educate people to recycle or reuse food, but to understand how the food system works and that there are alternatives.

"warns García Vega. And, although he recognizes the imbalance between the responsibility of consumers and that of the large companies that control the sector, he maintains that" as an individual action, the food that we buy and eat has quite an impact. With precooked and super-processed food you are losing control of what you eat and you are giving it to the large corporations, which decide for you the type of ingredients and how they are produced. If people discover the real impact that intensive agriculture and livestock have on the environment and our own health I hope, not only that they will change their behavior, but that they will demand much greater systemic changes. "

It is the wish of someone who, after many years of studies and burning his retinas in front of the computer screen, has decided to go from theory to practice. "My academic side has to do with bad news. All the introductions of the articles that I write are terrifying, because the data and forecasts are very alarming. But the idea here was the opposite: to give hope, to show that there are different paths that they can take us to better places.

.

And for that, there are few more effective tools than the documentary format. "If you watch

, for example, you go vegan in two hours. If through

we managed to change the public's mentality, it can have an impact on those dynamics so damaging that they seem immovable. It has been very exciting to go from the theoretical world, from everything that I have been reading and studying for a few years, to seeing it and experiencing it first hand, "he says with visible enthusiasm.

In each of the program's destinations, for which a second season is already in preparation, the biologist-turned-documentary maker addresses everything from the fight against deforestation in Sweden to the method of La Tasquería, Javi Estévez's restaurant where the parts are used. pigs that are usually discarded, going through the example of circular economy in Denmark or an expert in edible flora in Poland. Of all those experiences over the last year, the one that most impacted him was "being able to live for a couple of days with the Sami, the people of Lapland that have such an alternative system to ours.

also

With the skin of a topinambo (a type of tuber) an exquisite chocolate is made, with the waste of the cereals a very rich beer is made ... This program has made me see that there is nothing impossible! ".

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