How to Love Food and Hate Waste
In the UK alone, around 18 million tonnes of food end up in the landfill per year according to Food Aware. Roughly 1/3 of this is down to producers and the supply chain, another 1/3 to retailers and the rest to households. Much of the waste in these first 2/3 can be attributed to ridiculous ‘aesthetic standards’ that our supermarket foods must adhere to. In Italy or France, for example, shelves are stocked with different shaped, so-called ‘less than perfect’ fruit and veg, because people there haven’t had this idea of a certain standard drilled into them. To me, they look and even seem to taste nicer – give me a wonky carrot over a dead straight one any day.
In this article below, I’ll share with you some tips to help reduce your food waste, and to do your bit to reduce that final 1/3 of wastage attributed to households. Putting these ideas into practice will not only help the environment, but save you money. The average UK household spends more than £1,000 per year on wasted food – that's a colossal £23 billion per year across the whole country. Have a read through and send us over some of your own tips, or even photos, of your efforts!
I'm Dominic, and I've commandeered Becky's blog for this week to put up a contribution of my own, I hope you enjoy learning a bit about food wastage and how to do your bit to reduce it!
Fail to prepare, prepare to fail
The first tip I have for you is to make sure you plan your shop before you go and do it. If you do your shop once a week, have a think what you’d like to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner over the next seven days, and get just what you need for those dishes (plus a few snacccs of course). If you go into your shop with a clear idea of all the ingredients you need for the week, you won’t end up buying any old thing which you might not end up touching back home. Don’t forget to plan when you’ll eat the particular meal – the most wasted food item in the UK is pre-packaged salads, so if you want to chow down on some lamb’s lettuce (and who doesn't want to do that?), have that earlier in the week while it’s at its freshest. If you fancy a squash soup (like butternut, not summer fruits [strong joke]) then that’ll keep longer so plan to have that later.
Keeping it fresh
Once you're back at home, what you do next can be important for keeping your food fresh, and giving you more time to use it up before it goes off. The British Heart Foundation have a couple of good tips here – the first is as simple as to check your fridge temperature. Fridges can fluctuate in temperature depending on age, how full they are, and how many times they are opened and closed per day. The ideal temperature is between 0 and 5 degrees, if your fridge has sneaked up above that range, then take the temperature down or things like milk will go off much faster and end up in the bin. The BHF also remind us to use our fridge wisely – some foods actually keep better outside of the fridge like bread, potatoes and pineapples. Just pop ‘em in a cool, dark place to help them stay fresh...
Feed your glut
Even if you’ve planned your shop well, you still might have a little too much lying around come the end of the week. Here are a few things you can do:
Use your freezer – if you have too much stuff for one meal, make extra with the surplus and freeze so you can have that meal again later with no extra effort and no waste (unless that first meal turned out to be disgusting)
If you have overripe, blackened bananas, then bake them into a banana bread (great recipe here https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/brilliant-banana-loaf ) – this can be eaten as a nice cake, or served warm with some ice cream for an even nicer dessert! Speaking of ice cream, freeze your bananas (which will help them keep longer as well), then blend them with some honey and maybe a touch of milk or yoghurt and violas! Instant healthy ice cream!
If you have some bread which is past its best and a bit dry, blend it up for breadcrumbs and freeze for later use. If you have a nicer loaf from the bakery, you can make a delicious and healthy Italian bread salad called panzanella packed with tomatoes, basil and olive oil – find a recipe here, and sound delightfully pretentious when you tell people what you've made https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/panzanella_23604. You can also try French toast – made even better with that banana ice cream!
You can make some really tasty chutneys and pickles with leftover fruit and veg – apple chutney is a particular favourite of mine, but I also really like piccalilli (which you can put pretty much any veg into), as well as sweet jams and jellies. I would highly recommend this book from River Cottage to satisfy all your preserving needs (of which I have several) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Preserves-River-Cottage-Handbook-No-2/dp/0747595321/ref=sr_1_1?crid=GVLANEBEA6K7&dchild=1&keywords=river+cottage+preserves+handbook&qid=1586780694&sprefix=river+cottage+pr%2Caps%2C166&sr=8-1.
For the green fingered among us, you can even plant some veggies that you can grow and enjoy later in the year! Sprouted potatoes? Plant them 10-15cm deep in a potato bag or in a veg patch in your garden and once the leaves have grown and died back, you have a big batch of taters. Equally sprouted garlic? Plant as above (in maybe some finer soil and a bit closer to the surface), and again, once the green bits have come and gone, you should hopefully have a brand new bulb to use! Regenerating garlic, marvellous. Also, don't throw those seeds away! If you're not going to use them in your dish, then save and plant them in pots or seed trays. Here's a short list of seeds or stones that could definitely work well in your garden:
1. Squashes and pumpkins
2. Apples and pears
2a. Stairs
3. Sweet peppers and spicy chillies
4. Stone fruits like plums, peaches, nectarines and cherries
Of course, if you have too many tins or cans to eat up, look up where your nearest food bank is and drop them off there so the food goes to those who really need it. Considering the situation we find ourselves in at the moment, this can prove to be a very important thing to do.
Love your leftovers
If you’ve cooked something up but have a bit left or used as much of an ingredient as you may think you can, then there’s still lots you can do to stop that going to waste!
As above, use your freezer smartly to save meals for the future and stop your scrummy soups going to waste.
If you’ve had a roast chicken or a lovely lamb lunch for example, then don’t throw the bones away – make your own stock! Brown the bones in some oil, then add any leftover veg you might have lying around, such as onions (skins and all), garlic, carrots or leeks, and then maybe some herbs and some seasoning. Top up with plenty of water and leave to bubble away for 2-3 hours. This should keep in the freezer for a couple of months, and it tastes much, much better than the packet stuff! You'll never have to stock up (!!!!!) on those dry cubes again.
If you’re right at the end of a bit of parmesan or pecorino, then chuck the rind into soups, stews or risottos to extract that last bit of flavour – it’ll season the meal and give it that nice rich umami taste (yes that is a word).
The BHF give another handy hint here too – make sauces and dips with your leftovers! They suggest mashing up leftover beans or pulses if you’ve cooked too much (has anyone ever cooked the right amount of things like this or pasta?) with maybe some garlic, lemon and herbs for a hummus-esque dip. When I say beans, baked beans probably aren’t included. Bit weird. You can also try guacamoles and salsas with avocados, tomatoes and cucumbers.
If you still have too much to go round, or just have lots of veggie peelings going to waste, then you could start your own compost! I’ve just got into doing this and I’m finding it great fun, and it makes sure that every last bit of your food goes towards something useful rather than just lying in a tip. See Becky’s article on this for all the hints and tips you’ll ever need to get your compost up and running!
Well there we go! I hope these tips are just as tasty as they are useful in our fight against the problem of food waste. As I said above, these will help you do your bit towards protecting the environment, and help you keep money in your pockets.
Side note, these ideas are focused on what we as individuals can do to help, but obviously a significant portion of the issue lies with the supermarkets and suppliers who throw still-good food away instead of donating it to homeless shelters or food banks, and hold these ridiculous food standards. Although those carrots look very tempting, they probably wouldn't meet the UK supermarket standards.
If we can do our bit at home while putting pressure on the big supermarkets to actually do theirs too, then we can go a long way together to cutting out the crazy amounts of food waste that fill our rubbish tips. For example, if we buy more and more of the increasingly available ‘little less than perfect’ or ‘wonky’ fruit and veg appearing on our shelves, then they will see we don’t care about how symmetrical our produce is, and they’ll start to remove those standards. Take a look at Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s ‘War on Waste’ to learn more about food standards and the scale of the problem itself https://www.rivercottage.net/war-on-waste. Or, what may be even better, is to support smaller, local greengrocers and butchers instead of putting more money into supermarkets with billions of pounds of turnover. These independent sellers need our help more than ever at the moment, so let's go and support them to shun supermarket standards, and reduce our carbon footprints, thanks to the locally produced goods.
On that note, I’m off to make some banana bread. Again.
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