2024 | Trade - Chef
Hi, my name is Max, and I’m a 2024 Global Footprints Scholarship recipient.
I’ve always been a strong believer in food waste being an unnecessary evil that we weren’t doing enough about, and I really wanted to explore how we were addressing that.
When I was awarded the scholarship, I was a second-year apprentice working in a two-hatted restaurant in Sydney. So this was a great opportunity for me to travel, go overseas and explore other restaurants’ philosophies.
A few years before I was awarded the scholarship, I went to London and ate at a restaurant called Silo, which was famous for being the world’s first zero-waste restaurant. It left a really big impression, so I decided to go back there and do a month-long placement with them.
Entering the Silo kitchen was a really amazing experience. Everyone was really warm and welcoming, and it was completely different from the previous place I’d worked at.
Everyone was really passionate about sustainability, which was really inspiring because every day it felt like I was learning a million things about how they operate.
They showed me how to make everything, and they showed me their huge garum collection, which was made up of all sorts of by-products mixed with koji and fermented. Things like citrus, mutton scraps, cod heads and Parmesan rinds. They fermented everything and used it to create new dishes.
They milled their grains in-house to make bread, cultured cream to make butter and used the buttermilk to make ice cream.
The most impressive thing of all was their little cheese quavers, which used a closed-loop system. They mixed cheese by-products into their crackers, took excess vegetables and cooked them down into a caramel to drizzle on top of the cracker, then grated frozen goat’s cheese over it. They collected all the goat’s cheese that didn’t make it onto the plate and put it back into the cracker.
Things like these were really impressive to see.
Eventually, I was offered a full-time role, and I stayed with them for another three months. It was pretty hard. Some days I was working upwards of 14 hours, but being there with the team, kind of suffering together, made it a really rewarding experience.
Our breaks were really wholesome. We’d have staff meals as a family, all together in the private dining room, which made it really special.
I think this photo of the team best sums up the whole experience. It was my first week there, and we did a special pop-up menu with a sustainable Icelandic restaurant, Slippurinn, where we served fried cod wings alongside our tasting menu.
Going to London and working at Silo was a life-changing experience, and it has heavily influenced my direction and my life’s purpose. No amount of words could ever put into perspective the magnitude of the effect this has had on me.
As a result, I’ve actually decided to pursue a career in engineering to take this newfound sustainability philosophy even further.
I will forever be grateful to BBM and its sponsors for providing me with the opportunity to travel to London and experience Silo’s ecosystem. Without them, I would never have taken such a huge leap.
Thank you.
Max’s scholarship relates to these UN Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs):