Lauren Singer and Douglas McMaster Illustration by João Fazenda

The other day, in the kitchen of an event space called Fitzcarraldo, in Brooklyn, a visiting chef named Douglas McMaster was putting the final touches on a meal of what he called “supernatural peasant food.” McMaster is a zero-waste chef, meaning that his meals produce no trash. At his restaurant, Silo, in Brighton, England, he buys ingredients directly from farmers, to avoid grocery-store packaging, and returns peels and trimmings in the form of compost, creating what he calls a “closed loop.” His recipes strive to incorporate the whole vegetable. “So, like, these carrot tops, for instance,” he said, pointing to a plate of charred carrot disks. “Ten per cent went into that oil, ninety per cent went into the treacle”—a dark sauce made from vegetable scraps. “We maximize our resources to minimize waste.”

The dinner was organized by Lauren Singer, the twenty-seven-year-old founder of Package Free Shop, in Williamsburg. (She’s best known for fitting six years’ worth of trash into a single Mason jar.) At Fitzcarraldo, she said that she’d been “obsessed” with McMaster since discovering his work on Instagram. “I’d always thought that restaurants are inherently unsustainable, but Doug kind of shifted my whole conception,” she said. She’d organized the event, she added, to “spark conversation and community around zero waste and restaurants.”

Tickets—ninety dollars, or a hundred and fifty dollars with natural wine pairings—sold out quickly. Attendees included luminaries of New York’s sustainable-food scene: Adam Kaye, the co-founder of the Spare Food Co.; Ben Flanner, of the rooftop farm Brooklyn Grange; Tristram Stuart, whose company, Toast Ale, makes beer from day-old bread. Joost Bakker, an Australia-based artist, whom McMaster called “the zero-waste prophet,” had done the flowers. Singer pointed up to the ceiling to reveal his handiwork: four hundred yellow tulips, dangling by a length of wire, with the bulbs still attached. “He found the wire on the street,” she said. The tulips would be replanted later. “So it’s not like any flower has to die for this.” Bakker appeared, wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a crossed-out trash can. He said that he’d sourced the tulips from a farm in New Jersey: “They behave beautifully when you suspend them, because all the energy from the bulb keeps going down to the flower.”

At 5:30 p.m., McMaster clinked a knife against a wineglass, and previewed the meal for the staff. It was vegetarian, but hearty: the carrots had been confited, smoked, and grilled, to bring out their “meatiness”; the celeriac had been treated “like a leg of lamb.” “The beetroot is very much a beetroot,” he said. “And beetroot molasses—does anyone want to try some?” He passed out pea-size drops. “Oopa!” Singer exclaimed.

In the dining room, guests chatted over cocktails (sea-bean Daiquiris, Douglas-fir Old-Fashioneds). Mike Sheffer said that his date, Isabel Kardon, a server at the farm-to-table restaurant Blue Hill, had converted him to the zero-waste life style. “Just be trash-free,” he said. “If you replace your one-time-use items with reusable versions, you can save a lot.”

Kardon opened her tote bag to show off the utensils she carries around. “It might be a little gross, but at this point I just never wash them,” she said. “Is that too much?”

Juj Echavarri, an anesthesiologist, had brought her friend Geetha Kunasagaran, a technologist at Bank of America. “I’m not gonna get into my situation, but when I run the dishwasher I put them in there,” Echavarri said. “So at least they get washed.”

They talked about grocery stores. “Oh, my God,” Echavarri said. “It fills me with anxiety. It’s, like, mounds and mounds of plastic.”

Kardon nodded. “Supermarkets are filled with trash.”

Kunasagaran had remained quiet. “I’ve never been especially kind to the environment,” she said sheepishly, and pledged to take baby steps. “It’ll help me sleep at night.”

It was time to eat. Singer made a speech, and reminded diners that they would not be getting extra cutlery. “You will see you have a fork and a knife in front of you—guard that with your life.” A woman quietly retrieved her knife from the communal butter plate.

Talk turned to the trash in the ocean, and the masses of plastic and rubber flip-flops that routinely wash up on Kenya’s beaches. “Why are they talking about caravans of migrants?” said Michael Leva, who co-founded Sea Star Beachwear, which makes espadrilles that stay on your feet. “They should be talking about caravans of trash.”

After dinner, McMaster gathered his crew for a wrap meeting. He squinted into the compost bin, which contained a mixture of vegetables, eggshells, and slices of bread. “Tristram makes Toast Ale out of bread, so these bits of bread shouldn’t be in here,” he said. “Next time, these ones we keep, O.K.?” ♦