Many years ago, I ran into Alain Giraud, one of the best French chefs in Los Angeles, rummaging through crates of discarded vegetable greens at the Santa Monica farmers market. This was a good decade before food waste became the sort of thing people talked about on high-profile panels and in beautiful documentaries. Giraud doubtless already knew to use his kitchen’s parsley stems and fennel fronds in stock, as any classically trained chef would, so I ducked under the table and asked him what he was doing.

“It is for my rabbits,” the chef said in his thick Parisian accent, tucking a thatch of bright green carrot tops into the straw market basket under his arm, along with bouquets of lavender and chervil.

I remember this for many reasons. Because it was incredibly charming, of course, but also because my daughter used the story years later to guilt me into letting her get her own pet rabbits, which we have fed with discarded farmers market greens ever since. It was also an object lesson in free pet food and the accidental, often invisible treasures of farmers markets. Not only can you feed your kid’s permanently hungry rescued rabbits with the stuff but you can make your own dinner out of it too.

We throw an enormous percentage of food away, not only wasting food we know about but also food we don’t think of as being part of the farm-to-table sequence. Sometimes, when I’m at a farmers market pulling beet greens and carrot tops out of the discard bins, people will ask me what I’m doing with them. Or, more often, they’ll ask the nearby farmer whether the tops of the various vegetables they’re buying are edible.

Fresh greens are gorgeous, fragrant, healthful and enormously flavorful; they’re also endlessly useful in cooking. Not only do we use herbs and greens in soups, salads, sauces and stocks, but also in bouquets garnis, as garnishes, even in cocktails. Why we value some more than others is pretty arbitrary.

Until recently, many of the now pricey, sought-after and hard-to-find greens at markets were considered weeds: Farmers used to throw out stinging nettles and lamb’s quarters instead of selling them. Similarly, the green tops of various vegetables were often tossed into soups or stocks by thrifty cooks, but they’ve now found their way into mainstream kitchens and restaurants, often on menus by chefs who want to draw attention to the issue of food waste or who apply nose-to-tail principles to plants. Many have been using every part of a plant or vegetable for generations.

If making sherbet out of your celery leaves (as chef Jenn Louis does in her book, “The Book of Greens”) feels a little ambitious, treat these greens as you would parsley or other conventional herbs. Blend them into pesto, salsa verde, chimichurri and other sauces and salsas. Even simpler: Toss them directly into salads or whisk some of them into a vinaigrette.

If you’re not familiar with a green, taste it and consider what dishes you might like. Take inspiration from these recipes.