Lara Espírito Santo grew up shuttling between Rio de Janeiro and her father’s industrial farms in Paraguay and Brazil, traded a planned career in politics and international development for a kitchen job at Silo in London, and went on to co-found SEM, the zero-food-waste restaurant in Lisbon she ran with her partner George McLeod until closing it ten days before this conversation (not for financial reasons, but to figure out what comes next).

Source the cream instead of buying butter, and one ingredient quietly becomes four: butter, buttermilk, then whey and cheese once you split the buttermilk again. That unglamorous bit of dairy chemistry is the mechanic behind Lara’s central claim: you don’t get to zero food waste by managing waste better. You get there by going further back up the supply chain than most kitchens ever bother to look, and only then does the creativity actually start.

In this episode, recorded in central Lisbon, with the usual scattering of planes overhead, we get into how watching the birds disappear from her father’s 20,000-hectare farm pushed her toward activism and then back into restaurants, why SEM’s food costs ran at 17%, against an industry standard of 25–30%, why she closed it anyway, the case for an EU-wide black market in regeneratively raised organ meat, oyster shells turned into dinner plates, and why she’d spend a hypothetical billion euros de-risking the years it takes a farm to convert.