Fancy a salad of discarded vegie scraps or fries made from cow feed? If it’s good enough for the POTUS, it’s good enough for us, we reckon. Obama and 30 other world leaders, including UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, were served up a meal made entirely from scraps during a working lunch at the UN’s New York headquarters on September 27.

No foie gras or truffles to be seen – our world leaders made a meal of our leftover odds and ends.

Most chefs would scramble to serve up the crème de la crème of their country’s best produce, but not Dan Barber. The progressive New York chef, who ran a food waste pop-up restaurant earlier in the year, plated up “landfill salad”, salvaged from the waste of large-scale food processers and dressed with the liquid from a can of chickpeas, to push the point that more than a third of all food produced, worldwide, goes to waste.

A burger, dressed with “bruised beet ketchup”, came with a side of “corn cow” fries, made from field corn, which is feed to cows rather than humans, but still accounts for 99 percent of all corn grown in the USA.

“If food waste were a nation, it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions,” the menu read.

Dig in, POTUS.

It’s not the first time Obama has been treated to Barber’s no-waste cuisine – Sam Kass, the president’s former personal chef and senior adviser for nutrition policy, held his wedding at Barber’s Blue Hill restaurant in 2014, with the Obama family in tow.

Barber, an active food waste campaigner, also serves on the President’s Council for Phyiscal Fitness, Sports and Nutrition.