If you’ve eaten fresh pasta anywhere, you know there are always trimmings left over — odd ends of dough that don’t make it into the package. At Pasta La Fata in Columbia, those scraps don’t go in the trash. They go into dinner for 200 people.
The restaurant’s Scrappy Meals program started back in 2020, in the early, uncertain days of the pandemic, as a way to turn kitchen trimmings into something useful instead of waste, according to Inside Columbia. The idea is simple: fresh pasta trimmings get tossed with sauce, topped with Italian cheese, and turned into full meals. Restaurant staff donate the labor; a sponsor covers the cost of the ingredients and materials.
This week’s batch serves 200 people, and the meals are headed to Loaves & Fishes Soup Kitchen, the Columbia soup kitchen that serves meals nightly, year-round.
The sponsor picking up the tab this round is Groundswell Financial. “Thank you, (Groundswell) for helping us feed our neighbors, and for helping us build a stronger business!” the restaurant posted, according to Inside Columbia’s report.
Pasta La Fata hasn’t run this alone before, either. Since the program’s 2020 start, other Columbia food-and-drink spots — Ozark Mountain, Cafe Berlin, Beet Box, and Pizza Tree — have all pitched in as collaborators at various points, per the same report.
It’s a small-scale model, but it’s a durable one: a restaurant with kitchen scraps, a sponsor with a few hundred dollars, and a soup kitchen with people to feed. Five years running now, that math has kept working. If you’re a local business interested in sponsoring a future round, Inside Columbia reports Pasta La Fata is taking that conversation on social media.