UNITED NATIONS: World leaders accustomed to fine dining had a surprise on their plates Sunday at the United Nations — trash.

Chefs cooked up a lunch made entirely of food that would have ended up in garbage bins, hoping to highlight the extraordinary waste in modern diets and its role in worsening climate change.

On the menu for the lunch at the UN headquarters was a vegetable burger made of pulp left over from juicing, which typically wastes most of the produce.

The burger came with fries created from starchy corn that would typically go to animal feed — which along with biofuels is the end product of the overwhelming majority of the 90 million acres of corn grown in the United States.

“It’s the prototypical American meal but turned on its head. Instead of the beef, we’re going to eat the corn that feeds the beef,” said Dan Barber, a prominent New York chef who co-owns the Blue Hill restaurant.

“The challenge is to create something truly delicious out of what we would otherwise throw away,” he told AFP.

Barber crafted the menu with Sam Kass, the former White House chef who drove the anti-obesity “Let’s Move” campaign of First Lady Michelle Obama.

Kass thought of the waste-lunch concept as he learned about year-end UN climate negotiations in Paris, which aim to reach a far-reaching global agreement to tackle the planet’s worsening climate change.

“Everybody, unanimously, described it as the most important negotiation of our lifetime,” he said.

But food waste “was not something that was being discussed at that point, except in small environmental circles,” he said.

Major world leaders took part in Sunday’s lunch that was led by French President Francois Hollande and Peruvian President Ollanta Humala with an aim of building momentum for the Paris talks.