Vancouver chef repurposes surplus food to help address food waste

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Hi, it's Bridget! I learned about TJ Conwi's work with surplus food many years ago, when he'd just started ReRoot Kitchen. So I figured it was time to see how things were going.

This week:

When TJ Conwi started cooking, there weren't even compost bins. Everything that didn't make it into the dishes went into the garbage.

Right before the pandemic, Conwi was working as an executive chef at a major Vancouver hotel. He saw how much food was wasted and it alarmed him. 

This wasn't just random carrot tops. It was crates of produce that was perfectly fine for consumption, like eggplant or tomatoes, but not quite the right shape or colour. 

"It's not just your food scrap that you would throw out in the compost bin, it's actual good food," said Conwi.

Studies show that 46.5 per cent of all food in Canada is wasted, and about 41 per cent of that is potentially avoidable.

Redirecting food waste

In 2020, once the pandemic hit, Conwi started making meals to give to kitchen staff and friends who'd just lost their jobs and were dealing with food insecurity.

A lot of the soup kitchens were closed, and Conwi had access to all this surplus food that had already been ordered.

Chef Sean McDonald was one of the people Conwi called upon to help him make meals. They had worked together in the past in hotel kitchens and came to realize that food waste and food insecurity were just two sides of the same coin.

They co-founded ReRoot Kitchen and began transforming surplus food into packaged, chef-made meals full time.

ReRoot has now made more than 500,000 meals for charities across Vancouver from surplus food they receive from food service companies, local farms and food rescue organizations.

"It was mind-blowing how much food was going to waste, and the more you're exposed to it, obviously the more you want to prevent that from happening," said McDonald.

He said he isn't aware of many others that cook with surplus food, aside from a couple other kitchens that use surplus vegetables.

Measuring food waste

Ana-Maria Tomlinson is the director of strategic and cross-sector initiatives at CSA Group, Canada's largest standards development organization. It is working on ways to measure how much food is wasted.

"Without consistent measurement practices for food loss and waste, it's hard to interpret and compare across time and across jurisdictions," she said.

Tomlinson helped design the first national standard for Canadian food loss and waste. It was released this year in the hopes of guiding Canadian organizations to better define and measure what's happening. CSA Group is also working on an international standard.

The standard also includes an appendix with actions people can take to keep food out of landfills. She said what ReRoot Kitchen is doing follows one of them.

"He's identified a source of food waste and he's taken action to keep that food at its most valuable level, which is keeping it in the human food consumption status."

Surplus doesn't mean bad

A common misconception that Conwi encounters is that people think surplus food means compost or undesirable ingredients.

But recently, he got 18 five-kilogram cases of mushrooms and 270 kilograms of spot prawn heads.

"Before, it was kind of like what the heck are we going to do with all these spot prawn heads?" he said. "But now, we know how to manage."

They were turned into a variety of soups — chowder, bisque and laksa — and cream sauces.

Conwi grew up food insecure in the Philippines. He struggled to get by, and his work with ReRoot Kitchen is his way to give back.

One of the ways he does so is by spending time at the Landing Youth Centre in Vancouver, where he cooks healthy meals for kids from surplus ingredients.

He makes veggie trays from donated veggies and treats like Rice Krispies squares with roasted quinoa to add some healthier grains.

"It's healthy-ish, but at the end of the day we need to make sure that kids have all the nutrition that they need but are also able to eat it in a delicious manner." 

When he started working with the kids, the statistic was that one in four kids went to school hungry. It has now risen to one in three.

And almost a quarter of Canadians experience food insecurity.

"I'm not good at math, but those are all stats and numbers that really just don't make sense to us — that's why we do what we do."

— Bridget Stringer-Holden

Check out our podcast and radio show.  In our latest episode: Tessel Middag wants her sport to be a force for good. But she says that's hard to imagine when FIFA's "Major Worldwide Partner" for the 2026 World Cup is Saudi state oil company Aramco. And it's not just Middag. Advocates like Frank Huisingh feel uneasy watching athletes compete in extreme heat while flanked by advertisements for the globe's leading oil corporation. But as the world continues to warm, can advocates convince soccer's governing body to ditch oil and gas sponsorships and make way for climate-conscious partnerships?

Last week, Nick Logan wrote about a report that graded provinces on their use of electric school buses. The report noted that electric buses have the greatest benefits in provinces with clean electricity. A number of readers pointed out that P.E.I. Isn't "nearly entirely wind-powered" as the article stated. Most of the electricity generated on the island comes from wind, but the province  imports the majority its electricity from New Brunswick, which relies mainly on hydro, nuclear and natural gas. Thank you all — the web version of the article has been corrected.

Last issue also included a link to an article about different insurance rates for gas cars and EVs in the U.S. Sheridawn Maloney wrote: "I noticed that none of the references involved Canadian examples … I live in Ontario and I just traded in a 2016 VW Jetta for a 2027 Chevy Bolt (EV).  My annual insurance premium actually went down by $1!  Never before have I purchased a new vehicle and had my insurance premium go down. We would never want to accidentally discourage anyone from making the switch to an EV so I encourage everyone to get accurate information for their particular circumstance."

Write us at whatonearth@cbc.ca (and send photos there too!)

The winners of the 2026 Nature Scientist at Work competition were announced this week, and one of the winners was this shot from freelance marine biologist Uli Kunz. While it seems like this fragile coral sits caged in a glass dome under the looming, glowing gaze of divers and framed by a rusting chain, the true danger in this photo is the water itself. As rising ocean temperatures threaten reefs, this incubation chamber allows scientists to study how much oxygen is produced and consumed by the coral and their microscopic algae denizens. NOAA just announced that the fourth-ever mass coral bleaching event just ended, but little relief is ahead with a powerful El Niño underway. 

Other shots from the competition include a scientist drawing a tissue sample from a large whale shark as well as a huge algal bloom on Dog Lake in Ontario. 

— Anand Ram

As artificial intelligence data centres rapidly multiply across North America, so, too, does the opposition toward them. 

While there are only five hyperscale data centres in Canada, there are 96 facilities proposed or under construction across the country, according to a recent York University study. 

But protests against these projects have been growing across the country, from Hamilton, Ont., to Vancouver, driven by concerns about how much land, electricity and water these massive facilities consume. 

Meanwhile, a new Angus Reid poll found that 68 per cent of respondents would oppose a large AI data centre being built within a few blocks of where they live, suggesting the opposition may be more widespread. 

Here's a breakdown of the opposition these projects are facing and the concerns driving it. 

Power needs, carbon footprint, water consumption

Research suggests AI requires much more power than other internet services do to operate. 

On average, a single query run through the generative artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT needs nearly 10 times more electricity than a standard Google search, according to a 2024 report by the International Energy Agency.

That means AI data centres draw huge amounts of electricity as a result. 

According to the York study, a typical 100-megawatt data centre "would consume approximately 438,000 to 700,800 megawatt-hours annually — equivalent to the electricity consumption of roughly 40,000 to 64,000 Canadian households."

UN researchers say data centres consumed an estimated 448 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025. 

If treated as a country, that would make data centres the world's 11th largest electricity consumer, the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health said in a report released on June 3. 

The report warned these centres have a massive carbon footprint as a result, generating 189 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions in the same year. 

Along with electricity, data centres also need a huge amount of water for their cooling systems. 

The same UN report found that data centres globally consumed 4.5 trillion litres of water in 2025, enough ​to meet the needs of more than 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa.

Greener solutions

However, some developers say modern data centres are able to mitigate these problems.

Matt Milton, president of Microsoft Canada, said Microsoft is using new techniques to reduce water use, while a Utah project backed by celebrity investor Kevin O'Leary would use a closed-loop cooling system that reuses water to reduce water consumption. 

Some companies are also investing in off-grid power generation to avoid straining electricity grids.

AI anxiety

Beyond environmental concerns, the centres also seem to be a target of people's overall anxiety about AI. 

In Hamilton, some protesters carried signs critical of artificial intelligence more broadly. 

The Angus Reid poll found that 68 per cent of respondents wanted governments to heavily regulate AI, even if it slows development. Fifty-two per cent said they thought AI data centres were a bad thing for job creation, while 16 per cent thought AI was a good thing for job creation. 

Concerns over AI leading to job losses come as tech companies lay off workers amid a shift toward agentic AI. 

Last month, Meta laid off nearly 10 per cent of its workforce, while Jack Dorsey's Block cut his company's staff almost in half in February. Microsoft and Amazon have also mentioned shifts to AI after laying off thousands of workers in the last year.

Blayne Haggart, a political science professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., says these data centres give people something physical to direct their anger at — an argument he says was first put forward by U.S. Political scientist David Karpf.

"They're kind of the embodiment of this kind of like, malaise and antipathy and anger against AI," he said. 

"For young people, you know, it's destroying entry-level jobs. And mid-career workers, they see AI being used as an excuse to hollow out their workforces, leaving them kind of alone and overworked."

— Sarah Petz

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Editors: Emily Chung | Logo design: Sködt McNalty

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