Douglas McMaster - Silo
Douglas McMaster is a chef, author and founder of Silo - the worlds first zero waste restaurant. Douglas has been awarded many accolades over the years including ‘Britain’s Best Young Chef’ by the BBC. The artist and visionary Joost Bakker once challenged Douglas to ‘not have a bin’ and so Silo was born. Described by Doug as ‘a pre-industrial food system’ Silo has won awards for ‘Britain’s Most Ethical Restaurant’ and ‘Britain’s Most Innovative Restaurant’.
How did your journey to opening Silo, the first zero waste restaurant, begin?
It started with school, it started with not being good at it. Being severely dyslexic and having dyscalculia (which wasn't diagnosed or recognised then) meant I had a horrible education which created a bit of shadow over my teenage years. I just had a real burning hatred of education - the industrial behaviour within the education system. When I say industrialism I mean it’s like if every human was a plank of wood, every plank of wood needs to be the same. It’s a kind of homogenisation of people - and I didn't articulate it or think about it in that way when I was young but there are many different types of intelligence and everyone's different and behaves in different ways so I was just left out of education, it just wasn't for me.
I had a real burning desire to retaliate to that kind of social construct but I didn’t know what it would be, I had no idea! I dropped out of school and wasn't qualified to do anything - I use the word serendipity here as there's only a handful of options in the small town of Retford where I'm from in the north - and I just fell into a kitchen because it is the first thing I saw that was attractive and I could do.
The good thing about kitchens is that you don't have to have any qualifications, you just need to be willing to work extremely hard, under extreme conditions, get paid extremely minimal amounts and never have weekends off. So, I did that and I had this chip on my shoulder. I just had to prove to somebody, or a figment of my imagination, that they were wrong. It was self doubt that was forged quite heavily because of that educational system and I had to prove to someone that I was gonna do a good job and I became absolutely obsessed with learning, cooking and being the best I could be.
I got really, really good and won a National competition. I was 21 and named Britain's best chef. I remember winning this one thing and feeling so empty inside. It was like, oh my God this is the pinnacle of my career! You have all these expectations that you're gonna find fulfilment again. I couldn't even articulate or even comprehend these thoughts at the age of 21 but in reflection I think what I was looking for is a sense of purpose and fulfillment. I wanted to be okay with myself and feel like I could accept myself but I just found a black empty hole, you know, it was just nothing… and I was like fuck, this isn't good! So, then had a bit of an existential crisis and then decided to go traveling to Asia, New Zealand and Australia, that part of the world. I ran out of money very quickly so I started working at Michelin starred restaurants, some of the best restaurants in the country and the world… and I hated it. It was saturated in problems. There was violence and aggression in the kitchens. I witnessed some pretty horrific things. I don't mean to make it sound all bad because some of the best things in my life happened in those kitchens, especially around creativity, that is close to my heart. I didn't know why I hated it sometimes - if you don't know different, it’s hard to understand why you respond to a particular thing in a certain way, without context, without a frame of reference. You don't know why you do or don't like something, it’s a feeling and I was really unsure what I hated about this particular restaurant but the waste was so significant. It’s hard to say that now because we all know that waste is a bad thing but back then it wasn’t a bad thing! It was like the more waste you have the higher the standards, it polished your ego or demonstrated how wealthy you are, or whatever shit people thought about wasting food and it not being a problem. We would waste a skip full of food every day. A skip. And this was a big restaurant, it was massive, and everything we were told to do just didn't make sense to me but again I couldn't say why it didn’t make sense to me. It was a kind of revulsion.
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Then I met an artist, he was designing things out of waste materials. He was commissioned to make a building out of waste materials. His name is Joost Bakker and he was the zero waste prophet, he is the visionary. I was just in awe of this whole thing - I don't know why but I was drawn to it and he said to me, ‘could you not have a bin?’ He was making objects, places and experiences from waste materials but that's a reaction to the waste that exists. To then say ‘could you not have a bin?’ is something else entirely. It's a system, or an idea, of not creating the waste. He was doing something with it, not stopping it, so that was interesting because he had a building made from waste and he said, it doesn’t make sense that we’re wasting things. Where does waste go? A bin. Could you not have a bin?
It sounds logical and it is logical but it was such an abstract thing and I love disruption. I love disrupting social norms. I love disrupting existing frameworks of thinking.
I like to challenge dogmatic thinking around what is sustainable, what is ethical. I like to challenge that and opening a zero waste restaurant is a way of challenging cooking. I hated education and I hated the cooking industry so it was like right, I'm going to create something which proves all the things I was told were true are actually false. Yeah I'm gonna prove you wrong. Often, in therapy, I would come to the conclusion that my main motivation isn't some ecological aspiration, it’s rebelling against the systems and structures that made me feel bad about myself so it’s like a rebellious act.
Can you tell us about the recycled furniture at Silo?
I use the word ‘upcycled’. Recycling is where you turn a can into a can. This plastic table was never a plastic table, it was medical food packaging. This plate was made out of plastic bags. The bar was Italian leather shoes, so it's a metamorphosis which deserves a different title than ‘recycle’. It’s something else, something greater, upcycling is one word for it and I'm also trying to popularise the term ‘Nü Waste’. Nü Waste is the idea of materials being reborn because there is so much that happens in this metamorphosis that is significant and fascinating. It deserves its own title.
What do you envision for the future of restaurants?
I don't look at our goal as changing the world although that would be nice if we set this movement off which looks like we have. We started this zero waste restaurant 8 years ago in Melbourne and now there's thousands of zero waste businesses and there wasn’t any then so we’ve definitely done something and that’s great but going back to my personal motivation it’s why I, in an artistic way, have to rebel against what I think is wrong - that's the motivation. And in terms of anticipation for the industry changing for the better, it’s pretty nominal. Yeah, I have a moment where I think that would be nice but if I go to a restaurant and see them being grossly negligent to nature or something relative to the environment I don't walk away feeling sad.
Maybe that's an emotional defence mechanism but I don't have any resentment towards that establishment for being negligent or disrespectful (because it is). Humans are incredibly disrespectful to nature. We are destroying nature like cancer destroys us, which in a dark poetic way makes sense. Industrialism in the sense of factories, mono cultures, pesticides, processed food and petroleum and all these things you associate with industrialism, food being shipped all over the world, children not knowing what a cucumber is, all this is industrialism and that is a mechanism that we populated for our own gain. It basically is a system, a mechanism, to give us what we want when we want it. Greed, financial for the few, it's highly lucrative for certain people, it gives the vast majority of people security in getting food, however that system is so destructive to the health of the planet and the health of us. The more food becomes industrialised, the more it's processed, the more its coming from monoculture, the more it's coming from like dead soil, the more its got all kinds of chemical contaminants, the more it's deficient in vitamin K2 and it goes so, so deep and it’s endless the negative effect that this industrialism has on our health and the planet’s health and it is like cancer on Earth, it is and there is no two ways about it.
I feel like I am responsible for doing everything in my power to do what is right in my very meagre understanding of what is right. I can only do what's in my power.
How do you integrate a sense of self-care or well-being while working in the hospitality industry?
I'm going to generalise men here and say that there is a lot of this masculine toxicity which tells you your whole life to like stop moaning, get on with it, work harder, don't complain. I come from a very, very hard-working and working class miners town family and have worked myself to a very unsustainable level over the years and only recently had to have a circuit breaker. It got so bad, my health became such a significant concern that I thought now is the time to try and pull back. My sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight stress response, has been a constant and I'm not regulating access to my parasympathetic nervous system, my body is in stress mode and that has resulted in a bad heart rate variability which resulted in chronic ill health, severe back pain, severe nerve damage, a strange problem with dry mouth when I'm highly stressed. I have this response where my gums start stinging and I can't sleep at night - there’s just so much! This is because of excessive stress, extended periods of fight or flight and that has caused some serious alarm bells that I've now taken seriously. So, I had my first ever holiday last week! I went to Istanbul, had a phone detox, did some reading, actually just had a break and I've never done that before. I feel great now, even though we’ve touched on some heavier notes, my energy levels are through the roof, as good as it’s ever been. I feel great and although there are still problems that exist in me, you know it won’t go in a puff of smoke, that week was everything that I needed to show me what not to do.
Thankfully after trying different ways to not use social media, I honestly think I’ve cracked it - just deleting the app for a week and only downloading it when I want to post. I felt my thoughts were stifled by the feeling of a blockage, like a dam in a river, and as the days of the week went on I could literally feel that dam starting to crumble and the thoughts flowed through more and more every day. There was a genuine legitimately clear and distinctive point of difference that I haven't had in such a long time. It became super clear to me that social media is prohibiting thoughts.
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