Turn garbage to gold: Edit your menu

There are many forms of garbage, not just the rotting stuff in the cooler. Mostly, it takes on subtler forms.

My ever-widening search for cheap ingredients has recently taken me back to the fifteenth century. This past Christmas, I was given a slim volume of recipes from the 1400s, which I find both entertaining for its use of ingredients and refreshing for its candor. You can tell the recipes were written by cooks and for cooks: “hack” and “smite” are two common instructions, blood is a commodity, and you are considered a klutz if you break the egg yolks. The inventory is particularly revealing—in addition to the stomachs of pikes and pigs, you are expected to make use of a frugal ingredient called “garbage.”

I suppose we should be surprised that so little has changed in more than 600 years. It is my frequent privilege to poke through restaurant inventories, and I inevitably find garbage, though in our more decorous age it is seldom labeled as such. Its various forms are generally a bit more subtle than the rotting produce one might expect: overpriced ingredients, single-use items, dairy which expires four days from delivery, prime filets which will never be sold—and it is the sad duty of the consultant to put all this in a comprehensible linguistic framework.

We come up with kindly euphemisms like “diminished sales velocity” and “logistical sensitivity” because every item has gone on a menu after a certain amount of thought. If you’re going to tell some guy that it’s garbage, you’re condemning his decision, and possibly the entire decision process and his mother’s taste in hats. The lesson sticks better if he can draw the conclusion himself, so you show him numbers and wait.

And there’s garbage and garbage, and the two should not be confused. The word in 15th-century England meant “giblets,” and probably gained its current usage through the heroic, vain struggles of children against chicken livers. I quote: “Take fayre garbagys of chykonys, as ye head, ye fete, ye lyuerys, and ye gysowrys; wash hem clene, an cast hem in a fayre pot…” (A Fifteenth Century Cookry Boke; JL Anderson). The irony is that the word was a victim of the kids’ successful marketing effort, and escaped to live its own life. They hated “garbage,” so they called everything else they hated by the same name, and eventually giblets snuck out and got themselves a new word, unconnected with bags of used cat litter or hasty term papers. And so the gizzard-man does not come on Friday, and we don’t have a problem with livers in landfills.

Even a well-accepted definition can be stood on its head, though: Witness the trademarked Garbage Plate at Nick Tahou Hots in Rochester (the other Rochester: no Mayo). It consists of a base comprised of home fries, macaroni salad, baked beans and/or French fries topped with a burger or sausage or some other stuff. Available with raw onions, mustard, and Nick’s own hot sauce. It’s cheap, huge, improbable and unapologetic: a pretty good combination for a university town. They’ve been in business since 1918, and they seem to be thinking about franchising (there’s a button on their Web site for franchising information, which doesn’t work yet). Apparently, there are good things in garbage, if you look at it right.

So there’s a lesson in this compost heap, somewhere; and it has as much to do with linguistics as logistics. Yes, your numbers must make sense: Garbage items on menus create garbage in the cooler which fill the soul and the bank statements with noxious fumes. But understanding your customers—who they are, what they eat and how they speak—can turn garbage (or giblets) to gold.