What Happens to Leftover Food from Cooking Shows? Sunny Anderson and Katie Lee Biegel Explain

When watching your favorite cooking show, you’ll see chefs whipping up a delicious dish—often to just to eat one bite. So naturally, you may have thought to yourself, “Where is the rest of that food going? The crew doesn’t just throw it out after, do they?”

Don’t worry: Food Network stars detest food waste as much as we do. In a recent podcast episode of All on the Table with Katie Lee Biegel, Sunny Anderson joined her co-host of The Kitchen and shared that they originally bonded in their joint audition because they connected on not wanting to create unnecessary food waste.

“The best part of you was not liking that we were wasting the bread,” Anderson shared about Biegel, saying that their on-screen test was making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches together. “I remember someone—not me, because I don't waste bread—wanted to cut the crust off. And you were like, ‘Excuse me? Where's the bread going? We paid for the whole loaf!’”

The celebrity chefs admit that while sometimes perishable ingredients do get disposed of on the show, for the most part, the recipes made almost never go to waste.

“The truth is, though, people always want to know what happens to the food after we do it on The Kitchen. It does get eaten,” Biegel shares. “There's a crew of, like, 70, 80 people that are there eating the food.”

Not only does the crew help out to diminish the food waste, but Biegel also explains that anything not eaten on set gets donated.

“At the end of a shoot, whatever we have left over, it goes to a food pantry,” she says. “So there is very little waste.”

“One hundred percent, and let me tell you, how many times have we taken food home?” Anderson says. According to Biegel, the stars are given their own mini fridges and a quart-size container in their dressing rooms, so they’re encouraged to take home any leftover food they want.

We love that the stars prioritize mitigating food waste on set by saving it for later or donating it. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 30% to 40% of food is never eaten, and more than half of greenhouse gas emissions from landfills result from food waste. So any efforts to limit any food waste, whether on the set of a cooking show or in your own kitchen, is important. If you’re looking for simple ways to combat food waste in your own home, which will also help you save money, here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Compost. Any leftover fruits, vegetables, coffee grounds, eggshells and nut shells can head to a compost bin, which can be used as fertilizer for your garden, big or small. And composting can also help you save money in the long run.
• Get creative. Associate editorial director Carolyn Malcoun loves repurposing bits of random veggies by making a pot of Clean-Out-the-Fridge Vegetable Soup. You can use practically anything in it, and it’s easy to bump up the protein by adding some canned beans or leftover cooked chicken, steak or tofu.
• Freeze your perishables. Have a spare loaf of bread you’re afraid you won’t get to? Pop it in the freezer!. Frozen bread is great to use for French toast or stuffing. You can also freeze your produce so it stays at peak ripeness. I love freezing ripe bananas for banana bread (you can even freeze bananas whole and puree them, peel and all, for your batter), berries for smoothies and broccoli for stir-fries.