The Brief

How many ways can you cook an onion? Sure, you can chop and saute it… but how about roasting its skin until it turns black and then pulverizing it until it turns into a powder to be used as a seasoning?

That kind of thinking has led Lauren and Phil Pretty, the brother-and-sister owners of Heritage in Long Beach, to earn a Michelin Green Star for sustainable practices two years in a row, one of just 291 restaurants across the globe.

In the U.S., we throw away more than 30% of the food we buy, which translates into roughly 92 billion pounds of waste, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Much of that ends up in landfills, producing significant amounts of greenhouse gases and exacerbating the climate emergency.

A good chunk of that waste comes from restaurants. This is why the efforts of a new crop of chefs and cooks, like the Pretty siblings, remain so essential to the future of fine dining.

The zero-waste philosophy 

Heritage is small restaurant housed in a craftsman-style home on 7th Street, one of Long Beach’s busiest thoroughfares. It has a quaint yet upscale feel, with a sleek modernist kitchen and dining area, feeling like you are in someone's dining room.

The exterior of Heritage Restaurant in Long Beach on Sept. 4, 2024.

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The Prettys, who grew up in Long Beach, base their kitchen on zero-waste principles. This means everything — from food to packaging — should be used, and nothing should be thrown away.

According to Phil Pretty, who’s been cooking professionally for 20 years, it’s all about creativity.

From left, siblings Lauren, 33, and Phillip, 44, Pretty, in their restaurant Heritage in Long Beach on Sept. 4, 2024.

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“We're taking one ingredient and manipulating it four to five different ways rather than having five different ingredients,” he said.

It’s allowed him and his team to evolve in their abilities as cooks. “We can now rely on less is more," he said. "There are generally only three things on the plate. But within those three things, there's a lot of depth in how we work and how it gets to the plate.”

What does zero waste look like on the plate? 

Using a tasting menu model, which runs $150 a person, gives the duo a certain level of control.

Pretty uses the example of a recent shipment of a pork set, which typically contains an array of cuts of meat. Part of that set goes towards their pork shoulder dish, which is roasted whole to ensure they don’t waste excess meat.

This is followed by pork belly that’s cured and smoked.

Cucamelon vines grow throughout the Heritage Farm in Long Beach . The cucumelon is used in their Kanpachi Crudo dish.

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The Souvide Beet with fermented plum, beet tops, beet jus, is one of the restaurant's most zero-waste dishes.

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Then, a batch of onions is chopped to make jam with the pork belly. A second batch of onions is cut in half and cooked using the sous vide method (immersion cooking), causing them to curve into themselves. Those act as casings, which are then stuffed with the jam.

The remainder of the onion pieces, the middle parts of the vegetable, are then cooked down with cream and blended to create a soubise, a classic French sauce used as a base for the rest of the dish.

That kind of inventive thinking plays into Heritage's bottom line. The average cost percentage for a fine-dining restaurant is usually around 35% of its overhead. However, food costs at Heritage “hover around 28-30%, well below the average,” Phil Pretty said.

Betting the farm

Heritage's sustainable footprint goes far beyond the restaurant. The Prettys also founded Heritage Farm, a small plot of land up the street from the restaurant. The land is used primarily for growing herbs in large quantities for the kitchen, along with a few spaces for seasonal crops such as 1,500-year-old cave beans, an heirloom bean native to the southwest of the U.S., and tomatoes, passion fruit, and figs.

“We just planted a third fig tree, so we now have fig leaf ice cream on the menu. We'll use all the leaves first, then the figs will come into season, and then we'll start using the figs as well,” Lauren Pretty said.

Executive Chef Philip Pretty preps a fig leaf ice cream.

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The Grilled Lamb Rack with leek, artichoke, foraged mushrooms and lamb sauce.

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For the siblings, working toward sustainability also means supporting the local economy.

“I like to keep the money in the city as much as possible, and I like to keep the money in the family as much as possible,” Phil Pretty said. “Our goal was always to cut out the middleman in any way, shape, or form.” They’ve hired a full-time driver (Lauren’s husband Thomas) who visits the local farmers’ markets and does local runs to cheesemonger Oh La Vache, along with another local dairy purveyor.

Creating a local supply chain means the restaurant isn’t dependent on larger suppliers, who often use huge semi-trucks to deliver their products. That’s the norm for many restaurants in the U.S. and leaves a significant carbon footprint, from exhaust fumes to a constant supply of single-use packaging.

Making cents

However, the zero-waste kitchen is only one aspect of how Heritage earned its Green Star. Shortly after opening, the city of Long Beach asked if Heritage was interested in participating in the Green Business Network program, which involves steps to help Heritage become Green Business Certified. The certification process is granted after following a series of recommendations from an outside consultant.

The interior of Heritage Restaurant feels as if you are in someone's dinning room.

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According to Lauren Pretty, passion fruit grows at the Heritage Farm in Long Beach without pesticides.

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Lauren Pretty said she started with an office at the restaurant, properly sorting the trash using two trash cans, one for recycling and one for landfill, and has become even more skilled since then.

From an operations perspective, she said, she looks at everything from on-site paper products to printer paper, toilet paper, and paper towels. The same goes for cleaning products used, such as soaps and cleaning products, using hydrogen peroxide instead of bleach.

“You have to use chemicals to clean the restaurant. We're just making sure that we're making good choices when it comes to products like that,” she explained.

Ultimately, “it’s about taking the time to make small changes that don't cost anything to make your business more environmentally friendly,” she said.

The developer of ICEBlock, an iPhone app that anonymously tracks the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, has sued the Trump administration for free speech violations after Apple removed the service from its app store under demands from the White House.

The suit, filed on Monday in federal court in Washington, asks a judge to declare that the administration violated the First Amendment when it threatened to criminally prosecute the app's developer and pressured Apple to make the app unavailable for download, which the tech company did in October.

Following Apple ejecting ICEBlock, Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement that "we reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store — and Apple did so."

Lawyer Noam Biale, who filed the suit against the administration, said Bondi's remarks show the government illegally pressuring a private company to suppress free speech.

"We view that as an admission that she engaged in coercion in her official role as a government official to get Apple to remove this app," Biale said in an interview with NPR.

The Justice Department did not return a request for comment, but Trump administration officials have said the app puts the lives of ICE agents in danger.

When reached for comment, Apple also did not respond. The lawsuit, which does not name Apple, says the tech giant bowed in the face of political pressure.

"For what appears to be the first time in Apple's nearly fifty-year history, Apple removed a U.S.-based app in response to the U.S. government's demands," according to the suit.

Developer calls immigration crackdown 'abhorrent'

Joshua Aaron, the Austin, Texas-based developer of ICEBlock, said he launched the app as a way to empower those opposed to Trump's immigration crackdown.

"It was just the best idea I had to do everything I could to fight back against what was going on," Aaron said in an interview, describing Trump's immigration enforcement blitz as "abhorrent."

The app allows people to report an ICE agent sighting within a 5 mile radius, similar to how map apps, like Waze and Google and Apple Maps and others, alert drivers to police setting up speed traps. The ICE sighting alerts do not include photographs or videos and expire in four hours.

Yet the Trump administration has portrayed the app as being used to incite violence against ICE agents, something Aaron denies. An analysis of federal court records does not back up the administration's claim that violence against ICE agents has spiked.

Aaron's lawsuit says Bondi is mischaracterizing the purpose of the app.

"Fundamentally, ICEBlock neither enables nor encourages confrontation — it simply delivers time-limited location information to help users stay aware of their surroundings in a responsible and nonviolent way," according to the lawsuit.

Attorney General Bondi, in a July interview with Fox News, suggested Aaron was under investigation and had committed a crime. "We are looking at it, we are looking at him, and he better watch out, because that's not protected speech," Bondi said.

To legal experts, ICEBlock is latest "jawboning" example

To First Amendment advocates, the White House's pressure campaign targeting ICEBlock is the latest example of what's known as "jawboning," when government officials wield state power to suppress speech. The Cato Institute calls the practice "censorship by proxy."

ABC's suspension of Jimmy Kimmel after FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened regulatory action and Bondi promising a crackdown on hate speech following the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk are two other prominent instances.

"The use of a high-level government threat to force a private platform to suppress speech fundamentally undermines the public's right to access information about government activities," said Spence Purnell, a resident senior fellow at R Street, a center-right think tank. "If high-level officials can successfully silence political opposition, it sets a dangerous precedent for the future of free expression in this country."

Genevieve Lakier, a First Amendment scholar at the University of Chicago Law School, said the White House's campaign against ICEBlock shows the administration using what has become a familiar playbook: "To use threats of adverse legal and financial consequences, sometimes vague sometimes not so vague, to pressure universities, media companies, law firms, you name it, into not speaking in the ways they like," she said.

One potential weak spot for the lawsuit, however, is a lack of direct evidence that Attorney General Bondi, or other administration officials, made threats against Apple to have the app removed, rather than merely convinced the tech company to do so.

"And government officials do not violate the First Amendment when they persuade private speech platforms to suppress speech because that speech poses a national security risk or is harmful in some other way," Lakier said. "They only violate the First Amendment when they coerce or attempt to coerce the private platform to suppress the speech."

Since Apple kicked ICEBlock out of its app store, it cannot be downloaded now, but those who had it on their phones before the ban can still use it. Being removed from the app store prevents Aaron from sending the app software updates, which could eventually make it glitchy.

Aaron said he hopes the suit will lead to ICEBlock being restored to the iPhone app stores and for a clear message to be sent to the Trump administration that prosecuting him for his role in developing the app would be illegal.

Aaron said he and his legal team "have been preparing for this fight," adding that "we will take it as far as it needs to go to ensure this never happens again."
Copyright 2025 NPR

Twelve FBI agents who were fired this year for taking a knee during racial justice protests in the heated summer of 2020 are suing the Bureau and its director, alleging unlawful retaliation.

The former special agents—who together have nearly 200 years of experience—once received awards for helping disrupt mass shootings, expose foreign spies and thwart cyber attacks.

But they say as elite federal law enforcement agents, they never received training on crowd control, nor did they have riot shields, gas masks, or helmets when they faced down volatile crowds in the streets of Washington, D.C., in June 2020.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington on Monday, described the small group of FBI agents as vastly outnumbered and literally backed against the wall of the National Archives building as unrest swept the country over the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Court papers said they kneeled not to reflect a left-wing political point of view, but rather to de-escalate a situation that threatened to spin out of control.

"Mindful of the potentially catastrophic consequences, Plaintiffs knew that a split-second misjudgment by any of them could ignite an already-charged national climate and trigger further violence and unrest," said the lawsuit, filed by former Justice Department prosecutor Mary Dohrmann of the Washington Litigation Group.

Accused of 'lack of impartiality'

The Justice Department inspector general reviewed the incident in 2024 and found no misconduct. But the episode went viral on social media, attracting critics who cast the kneeling as a political act. Before he returned to the White House, President Trump also posted a negative story about the matter.

Soon after new FBI Director Kash Patel joined the Bureau this year, the lawsuit said he began targeting the agents involved in the episode for retaliation. Several of plaintiffs were yanked from supervisory roles at the FBI. Officials launched a new investigation. The matter was still pending when they were all fired in September, shortcutting typical procedures for FBI misconduct probes.

In their dismissal letters, Patel wrote: "You have demonstrated unprofessional conduct and a lack of impartiality in carrying out duties, leading to the political weaponization of government."

During his confirmation hearing, Patel told senators he would honor the internal review process. But the lawsuit accuses him of breaking that pledge for his own political purposes.

The abrupt departure of the fired agents disrupted important work, including evidence collection in Utah following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and efforts to support the Trump administration's executive order on "Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful," court papers said.

The case alleges violations of the agents' First Amendment rights to free association and their Fifth Amendment right to due process. They're asking to be reinstated to their jobs and for back pay.

The FBI declined to comment on pending litigation.

Copyright 2025 NPR

A drawn out battle over a city law boosting the minimum wage for tourism workers in Los Angeles seemed like it was finally over this fall when a referendum to overturn it failed to gather enough signatures.

Now there's another twist in the road. City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson previously voted to raise airport and hotel worker pay from $22.50 to $30 an hour by 2028, when L.A. will host the Olympics. But in a motion filed Friday, he's proposing that the increase take effect more slowly, instead reaching $30 an hour in 2030.

Harris-Dawson's proposal sparked outcry from hotel workers union Unite Here Local 11 and other labor advocates.

“These workers fought for more than two years to improve their working conditions, only to have the very people who should defend them try to take it all away," Yvonne Wheeler, president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, said in a statement. "It’s heartless, it’s callous, and it deepens the crisis of working poverty that is gripping our city.”

Labor advocates say Harris-Dawson is succumbing to pressure from corporate interests.

Over the summer, a coalition of business leaders filed a ballot proposition to repeal the city business tax, which brings in hundreds of millions of dollars to the city. The L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce told LAist the proposition was partly in response to the City Council boosting the minimum wage for tourism workers.

Unite Here Local 11 filed its own raft of proposals, including raising the minimum wage citywide and requiring Angelenos to vote on building new hotels and event center developments. This war via ballot proposition led city leaders to encourage both sides to come to a compromise.

A spokesperson for Harris-Dawson said the city is currently in talks with business and labor interests, and declined to comment further on his recent motion. Mayor Karen Bass's office did not respond to a request for comment.

The motion now goes to council committees on tourism and jobs.