Editor's note: This story is part of #WasteNotNJ, a special, statewide investigation into the problem of food waste and ways to fight it in the Garden State by the USA TODAY New Jersey Network.

Picture this: You are at your kitchen counter, wondering what to do with the remains of dinner — a picked-over rotisserie chicken.

Most likely, you will toss it.

Then you clean out the fridge, and a half-empty bag of wrinkly carrots and withering celery stalks join the chicken.

But to a chef, this isn't trash. In the hands of a chef, these are ingredients. And chefs all across the Garden State — from Little Silver to Cherry Hill, from Old Bridge to Wayne — can teach home cooks a thing or two about rethinking tossing those ingredients in the trash.

More:Americans waste nearly half their food. How can we reduce food waste in New Jersey?

Slowly simmered in a pot of water, those chicken bones and vegetables become a rich stock. Day-old bread gets new life as breadcrumbs. Herbs past their prime are folded into butter, and the wilting tops of beets and carrots are blitzed into pesto.

But why do this? Wouldn't it be easier to toss the leftovers and start fresh?

Two reasons: First, in a restaurant kitchen (and in your own kitchen), wasted food means wasted money, and that's just bad business. But wasted food also means wasted potential. Passionate chefs enjoy the challenge of shaping leftover bits into something new — especially when they can excite diners with the finished dish.

As New Jersey begins the 12-year journey toward cutting food waste by 50 percent, as set forth by a 2017 law signed by former Gov. Chris Christie, we wondered about the role restaurants play in solving the problem.

We asked four New Jersey chefs for their thoughts on food waste and how they handle the issue in their kitchens; this is what they had to say.

From the kitchen to the farm — and back again

A wooden farm gate hangs above the entrance to Junior Chamon's restaurant. It is a gate that tells a story.

Growing up in Brazil, Chamon's grandfather ran a dairy farm. When he and his brothers visited, they would argue over who would be the one to open the gate.

Now the story has come full circle: Late last year, the owner of Graze in Little Silver bought a farm of his own.

More:Join us for a farm-to-fork tasting that also fights food waste

"It's been a lot of work, but I love it," the chef said one weekday morning from the fields of Grazing Acres Farm in Old Bridge, where he was planting corn. He owns the seven-acre farm, previously Fly Brook Farms, with Graze's chef, Chris Kirkwood. "It's our peaceful time before we go into the restaurant, to the chaos. We come down, we plant, we weed, then we go into work."

The crops — garlic, tomatoes, eggplant, carrots, herbs, lettuces — will stock the restaurant's kitchen. When the corn is harvested, it will feed the farm's organically raised chickens; nothing will be wasted.

In the kitchen, Chamon works with whole fish: He cooks the cheeks and belly and makes stock from the bones, then composts them. He purchases whole pigs, animals that weigh upward of 220 pounds, then butchers them in-house, even offering classes on how to do so. The bones are served with their marrow, a dish that was slow to catch on but now sees two dozen orders a week, and the kitchen prepares pork chops and roasts. Then there are the flavorful parts that remain, unfamiliar parts people are not used to because they didn't grow up eating them, the chef said.

More:Food waste in NJ: Leftover foods used to help those who are left out

"It's been a challenge on how to sell it," he said. "If you put head cheese on the menu, no one buys it. So we break it down. We braise it, turn it into a ragu, We put it in empanadas, serve it with pasta. It's fun to be able to utilize everything."

When he is done, what remains of the 220-pound animal is less than 5 ounces of waste.

"The way I grew up, you used every part of the animal," Chamon said. "Our focus is to not waste anything."

No waste? Better for business

Like Chamon, Chef Robbie Felice owns his restaurant, and that means he is always watching what goes into the garbage.

"I feel like if you ask any good chef about food waste, they're going to have an extreme, utter care for it," said the chef, who owns Viaggio Ristorante in Wayne with his father, Joe Felice. "No good restaurant should ever have any food waste. Food waste means you're not making your restaurant money."

This is especially true, he said, for restaurants without liquor licenses, such as Viaggio.

"We make all of our money on food," Felice said. "If I see something going in the garbage, that's literally money going in the garbage.

Like Graze, Viaggio utilizes a whole-animal program. "We use everything, from the bones to the snout (which goes into porchetta di Testa, a deboned pig's head that is filled with herbs, rolled, cooked and sliced) to the hooves, called trotters. We braise the hooves and pull off the fat and the meat (and use it to fill ravioli or in ragu). Every day we get to say, 'What are we going to do with this part of the pig?' "

Home cooks can learn from this whole-animal approach: " You can fry the skin and make chicharrone," he said. "You can cure the fat and make lardo and use that instead of butter.

"You don't need to buy the most perfect cut of this, the best cut of that," Felice said. "You can take whatever scraps you may have and you can turn it into something delicious."

Rob Santello, a guest chef at Heirloom Kitchen in Old Bridge through July, spoke of using every bit of a whole duck for a particular entree.

"Every aspect of the duck is utilized. We save the breast, and that's the main component for the dish," he said. "We take the legs and cook those, we confit them in duck fat. Then we shred the meat and wrap it in a cabbage roll, and that's an element of the duck dish."

The bones are roasted with vegetables to make stock, which is reduced into a jus used to sauce the plate.

"I think its my responsibility, being a chef in this industry, to respect everything that's been given to me," Santello said.

Felice echoed that sentiment when speaking of the farmers from which he sources produce and animals. "They put just as much time as we do into creating dishes into birthing the pig, raising the pig," he said. "If they knew you were throwing out the hooves, throwing out the skin..."

The bigger picture

Todd Fuller's Cherry Hill restaurant is a long way from Seattle, but when asked about ways to curb the food waste problem, the chef points west.

Fuller, who co-owns The Farm & Fisherman Tavern, said real, impactful change comes with regulation.

"In Seattle, you get fined if you put food in the trash," he said, referring to a law that took effect there in 2015. "And there's no garbage disposals, so you have to compost."

As of now, there is no such law in New Jersey. But in Fuller's kitchen, he does as much as possible to cut waste. Like Felice at Viaggio, he is cognizant of what is thrown away.

"If you want to be successful as a chef, one of the first things I learned is you're always looking in trash cans," he said.

This does not mean the chef of your favorite restaurant is cooking with food pulled from the garbage. Instead, if a seasoned chef sees a rising cook discard something useful, he should teach him or her how to use it. "Because you don't know what you don't know," Fuller said.

"In fact, we just talked yesterday about how to use the heads of fish; you can only make so much stock and soup. We have to be creative and play to ways the people can grab onto," Fuller said, adding that tacos are an easy way to introduce diners to an unfamiliar ingredient. "You have to think of a vehicle that people are excited about."

But he reiterated that using whole animals and cooking with every bit of a vegetable can only do so much.

"The most common example is the celery heart. Nobody uses the celery heart, but it's the best part of the celery, to me," Fuller said. "But in the big picture, is (teaching people to utilize all of a vegetable) really what's going to turn this around?

"What's going to turn this around are the big boys creating some practices that help," he said. "I think the changing of the culture is the biggest challenge. It's a long way away for us."



