September 2025
What can you really do with fruit and vegetable peels? Are all scraps edible? And how do you know which ones deserve a second life in your kitchen? These were some of the questions that came up during our online workshop, ‘No Scraps Left Behind’, led by chef and author Arina Suchde.
Held as part of the Local Food Club’s engagements through October, the free virtual session was exclusive to our community and drew nearly 70 members from across India, all logging in to learn about reclaiming what usually goes into our bins.
The workshop went beyond just a cooking demo. Between Arina’s step-by-step instructions and live experiments, the chat box came alive with participants swapping recipes, cultural anecdotes, and personal hacks on living with less waste. It was less like a class and more like a gathering—shared across kitchens and cities—bound by the belief that food deserves to be respected in its entirety.
The virtual nature of the workshop allowed for a rare glimpse straight into a chef’s kitchen, as Arina sliced, stirred, and blended while eager participants made notes. She began with the kind of scraps that collect in almost every Indian home—pea pod shells, banana skins, potato and carrot peels, cauliflower stalks, and broccoli stems.
First up—a simple pea pod soup. The trick, Arina explained, is to boil, blend, and strain the pods first, thus getting rid of the fibrous bits that are hard to swallow. What remains can be simmered with onion and garlic, and blended once more into a hearty, aromatic green soup.
Arina kept coming back to an important point: If it’s still on your chopping board, it isn’t waste. It’s still an ingredient, waiting to be used.
From there, the hour turned into a lively tour of the ‘second lives’ that ordinary scraps can have. Banana peels and citrus rinds, cut and massaged with sugar, surrender their aromatic oils into a concentrated syrup for drinks and desserts; the peels themselves can be dried to create candy-like nibbles.
Corn silk, steeped for 15 minutes, makes a mellow tea that tastes like buttery popcorn. The white rind of a watermelon behaves like raw papaya: shred it for a som tam salad, cook it into halwa, pickle it for sandwiches, or even make a kimchi. Onion, garlic, and carrot peels can be dried and blitzed into a pantry salt that elevates everything from fried eggs to cocktail rims. Potato peels—cleaned, flavoured, and roasted—make for chips you won’t be able to put down.
Arina kept coming back to an important point: If it’s still on your chopping board, it isn’t waste. It’s still an ingredient, waiting to be used.
Of course, not every scrap is meant to return to the plate. But, as Arina reminded us, inedible doesn’t mean useless. Coffee grounds, whisked with a little oil and sugar, can double as a body scrub. Citrus peels become a natural cleaner that leaves glass streak-free and the air smelling fresh.
Even the odds and ends that seem too far gone can be coaxed back into life: A potato/sweet potato sprouting eyes can be cut and planted to grow again, while spent tea leaves can be added to soil to nourish houseplants. Woven together, these small tips turned the workshop into an eye-opening, interactive session, nudging participants to see everyday scraps in an entirely new light.
The workshop came alive as participants came up with questions and shared stories. How does one deal with the spiky texture of radish leaves? Arina suggested chutney, or a Gujarati-style mudya. Carrot tops, she noted, stand in for coriander or parsley as a garnish, while discarded prawn heads lend depth to broths. Members also shared how scraps are used in their own cultures—pumpkin flowers fried or stuffed in regions in Eastern India, or peel-based chutneys in the southern part of the country. One participant even described making bioenzymes from citrus peels to clean floors. Woven through these exchanges were personal stories of neighbours sharing compost bins, of families trading food and tips, of experiments to waste less together. What began as a cooking demo soon unfolded into a collective exchange of culture, resourcefulness, and the small practices that make low-waste living feel possible.
Pea Pods
Banana and Plantain Peels
Pumpkins and Gourds
Drumstick (Moringa)
Broccoli
Onions
Coriander (Roots, Stems, Leaves)
Arina Suchde is a chef and educator with nearly two decades of experience in food and sustainability. Her workshops are a primer to her book, The No-Waste Kitchen Cookbook, which reimagines how we use scraps and leftovers.
Continue your no-waste journey with a few of our favourite recipes from Arina’s The No-Waste Kitchen Cookbook here.
To know more about Arina’s work and approach to low-waste cooking, read an excerpt from her debut book ‘The No-Waste Kitchen Cookbook’ here.
Dive deeper into October’s theme, No Scraps Left Behind, on the LFC website here.
Sign up to join the Local Food Club here, and get access to upcoming meetups and workshops.