I Don't Want To Preach But..... Stop Food Waste Day
April 29th 2020, is special for two things. Firstly, it’s my birthday and secondly, it’s Stop Food Waste Day.
It’s the second and most important one that I want to chat to you about, ‘Cos lets face it, when you get to my age, it’s always good to redirect the attention onto something else.
Stop Food Waste Day is just what it says on the tin. A day to bring attention to how much food is wasted and if I’m lucky, share with you some tips and tricks to help with that.
You may be surprised to find out that the majority of food waste doesn’t come from the places you’d suspect such as supermarkets and restaurants. Our homes are liable for much more of the global food waste taken to landfills, waste from meals we’ve cooked and food we’ve bought and not used.
Food waste is something that comes up again and again with regularity in the media, and so it should. Now more than ever with COVID-19, isolation and shopping only for essential ingredients, paying attention to and reducing food waste is something I feel will help.
It’s such an important subject, my personal feeling is that it should always be in our minds from planning a meal to disposing of it.
I want this piece to be a reference source to help us all cut down of food waste in the home, and to give tips and tricks to try and make it a little easier and less daunting thing to start for ourselves.
Just like giving up smoking, something I’ve done many years ago, a good way of cutting down is to do it in manageable stages. As with giving up anything that’s not good for us, making it less overwhelming and taking small steps to begin a new way of looking at food is the best way to start.
That’s exactly what it means to stop wasting food, it’s about changing the way we all live, shop, cook, think about food and passing all this onto our children, our friends and the rest of our family.
Too much?
I don’t mean to sound as though I’m preaching, I don’t mean to do that, but I believe that unless we all pay attention to our food waste, and sooner rather than later, the only way is down.
Before I go on to give you some easy tips and practical ways of using up what you may think of as leftovers or even waste, let me tell you just a few of the many reasons why we should be more self-aware
While researching for this piece, I was so shocked with some of the statistics I found I had to go back and check again and again.
Do the following facts shock you too?
Surprisingly, in most developing countries, 1/3 of all the food produced goes to waste. That is 10.7 million tonnes worth of food waste, per year.
That sounded a lot to me, but I needed to see this data in a form that was more practical for me, just to make me believe it. So I looked for more information and found that the 10.7 tonne converted into a waste of £730 - £840 per average family of four in the UK and $2,275 in the USA.
Together this adds up to approximately £15 Billion per year of food waste from homes.
I didn’t believe it either. Just think what we could do with that much money. NHS, Cancer research, educating our children lots of chocolate or gin.
Most of us who like food, like to cook and definitely like to eat, are aware of where we get our food. Whether you’re a Marks & Spencer shopper or an Aldi shopper, we all read the labels and know if our food is local to us or shipped from overseas, organic or not. What happens when the waste food leaves our homes and hits the landfill is something most of us pay little attention to, yet it’s crucial to why we all need to be aware of how we use our food now and in the future. So here are some more facts that wowed me.
According to Which Food, food waste causes as much change to our planet as plastic waste, for example the energy needed to produce, the water footprint etc. It produces greenhouse gases too.
Initially when we take our food waste bins out to the street to be disposed of, to be dumped into landfills, the food inside such as our banana skins, tea bags coffee grounds, chicken bones, carrot peelings and leftover cooked food waste, is pretty harmless. Unfortunately, after a time, it starts to break down and bad things begin to happen.
When breaking down it produces greenhouse gases 25 times more harmful to the planet than carbon dioxide.
This equates to approximately 20 million tonnes of greenhouse gases. If we think about this in relation to cars on our roads, this is the equivalent as 3.5 million extra cars.
It’s very noble, all the noise we make trying to get cars off the road. Buying electric cars or cars that use un-leaded petrol so that we can make our environments better for us, for the next generation and for our planet, and we shouldn’t stop doing that. However, food waste from our homes is something individuals can do to preserve our planet on an even more day to day personal level. Making households more aware and educated about the problem leaves us all to be more accountable for what is thrown in the bin each day.
I hear everyone shouting at me right now, what about shops, restaurants, manufacturing in relation to food waste? Take a look at this pretty pie chart the lovey Mr G made for me.
Now that’s a bit of surprise isn’t it?
Something else that surprised me was the type of food we threw away every day. Another pretty pie chart by the lovey Mr G. He does prefer a graph, but with a little persuasion and the right information this is what he drew.
In all honesty, very few people are able to make businesses cut down on their food waste. I know I have no chance of making a multi-million-pound business stop getting rid of perfectly good food. But I can hold myself, my home and the people who live in it accountable.
Before I give you some tips and before everyone gives up the will to live, even I can feel my eyes glazing over with all this preachy stuff, there is just one more piece of information I’d like to mention.
It’s estimated that by the year 2050, there will be an extra 2.3 billion people on this planet. To feed everyone we will have to increase the production of food by 60-70%. That is, if we don’t start to think about food in a different way. Here is what I think needs to happen for us all to be able to reduce the food waste from our homes.
I can’t do anything about reducing anyone else’s food waste, just my own.
Just my opinion, but I think we all need to think differently about food in 5 ways:
How we buy our food?
When we buy our food?
How we store our food?
How we cook our food?
Change what we class as food waste
Let’s start with how we buy our food. My first tip would be to start a list and plan the meals you want to make for the coming week, writing down all the ingredients you need including items for lunch boxes and snacks. .
I know this sounds really boring, and it is, unless you’re sitting your O level home economics (Is that still a thing?) but you won’t have to do it for long. Keep track of the store cupboard ingredients you already have such as flour, salt, dried herbs, tinned tomatoes etc. This way you won’t over buy or buy what you already have, or like me, buy the same things again and again – How many OXO cubes do i really need? It’s my memory not my age, well that’s what I’m telling myself .
It won’t take you long to be able to identify which ingredients you’ll need to buy and which you’ve already got, so making lists will then become a thing of the past.
Using Local shops is the way lots of people are getting their essential shopping right now, more from necessity because of COVID-19, than anything else. Hopefully this will carry on once lockdown has finished, but that’s a whole other piece of writing.
Shopping daily is probably not something most of us can do, but the premise of this is something to think about.
Going to a supermarket for our “big” weekly shop sometimes means that we bulk buy fresh ingredients such as fruit and veg’, bread or even milk. Check out Mr Gs pie chart, these are the things that have a high percentage of waste.
Try to buy long lasting items when you make the trip for your “big” shop, things like tinned vegetable or beans, gravy granules and mustard, these sort of things. Things for your freezer too.
Save the fresh items to buy from your local shops on a daily or twice a week shop, and only in the quantities you need. No need to buy a dozen bananas which you know will be going off before you get around to eating them when you can buy less and enjoy them fresh and ripe.
Killing two birds with one stone, cutting down on food waste and supporting your local community by helping small businesses.
This brings me nicely to the second point: When we buy our food?
I’ve mentioned the freezer so let’s chat freezer. What do you use yours for? I’m placing a bet that there are ice cubes, ice cream and frozen peas rolling around in there, and if you’re like me and can’t make a good Yorkshire pudding no matter which recipe I try, a bag of Aunt Bessie’s.
The term “Freeze now, use later” should become our mantra.
Most foods can be frozen, butter, cheese, eggs, fruit, veg’ and bread for example. Crack and beat the eggs before freezing and slice the bread if it’s not already sliced.
A tip, when you buy sliced bread, freeze it in bags of 4 slices, this way you can take out exactly how many you need rather than adding it to the waste food bin. Meat items can also be divided up. If mince is on special offer, buy it and share it between bags for the freezer in weights you’ll use for meals (Here is where those lists come in to play).
You’ve bought a whole chicken? Cut it up into pieces and freeze the bits you don’t want to use right away.
Freeze leftover cooked dishes too. Enough soup leftover for one portion? Freeze to use when you need it.
A couple slices of meat from the Sunday roast left on the plate, get those in the freezer. Keep doing this and after a while, you’ll have enough to make a great curry or pie.
One of the most important ways of paying attention to when we buy our food, is to understand the difference between use by and best before dates.
The use by date is about safety and means that food isn’t seen to be safe to eat after this date.
The best before date is just that. It’s about the quality of the food and is perfectly safe to eat after this date.
You’ve seen that little huddle (usually me) around the spot in the supermarket that has all of those best before reduced meats and veg’? Those are perfect to buy and freeze. Don’t be put off if the best before date is that days, freeze, freeze, freeze.
The opposite is also true, food doesn’t have to be frozen on the day of purchase, just remember the use by date.
How we store our food once we’ve bought it is really important to ensure our food stays fresher for longer.
When was the last time you checked the temperature of your fridge? Probably when you first turned it on straight after delivery like the rest of us. For best storage, fridge temperatures should be between 0-5c. The correct temperature and a few tips can get you on the road to changing the way you store food in the fridge.
For instance, for longer life, most fruit and veg can be kept in the fridge. There are a few exceptions such as potatoes, onions and bananas. With potatoes refrigeration increases the amount of sugar they contain, not something recommended. Onions absorb moisture easily so in the fridge, they might become mushy and go off quicker.
Oh, something else here. When buying onions, give them a little squeeze, if they feel soft, choose another one. This soft feel means they’ve probably been frozen while in transit so they’ll go off quicker once you get them home.
Putting Bananas in the fridge will help them stay ripe for a few days but putting them in while they are still a bit green and hard will stop them ripening all together, even after you take them out of the fridge to use.
Before putting items in the fridge, take them out of the plastic wrapping. With it on, moisture builds up inside the bag and food will go mouldy quicker than if stored open. Decant the mushrooms into a paper bag instead of the plastic to avoid them going slimy and to keep bags of salad or spinach leaves fresher for longer, open the plastic bag and put in a piece of paper towel to absorb some of that moisture.
Of course, how we cook our food is something that I’m passionate about. I’m a massive believer in nose to tail or carrot tops to roots kind of cooking.
I know this isn’t for everyone, but to keep food waste down, we have to think about how to cook our food differently, more creatively and know what we can eat and what we shouldn’t.
The first change is to learn to cook. Easy, right?
I think that cooking in the home, for family is easy and what used to be something our parents and grandparents did every day for every meal without relying on recipes, has now become something that is seen as an art rather than as a necessity.
I can hear you all shouting at me again, calling me hypocrite. One of my greatest pleasures is going to great restaurants to eat great food, and I’m lucky enough to have been to some amazing Michelin star restaurants with some great chefs.
That’s not the sort of cooking I’m referring to. I’m talking about the sort of cooking that is tasty, has variety and gets us all sitting around the table chatting about our day. This sort of cooking, cooking from scratch, has somehow become “scary” instead of normal, and it shouldn’t be.
Start finding the dishes you want to cook an eat in a fun way. Getting children involved in finding recipes and cooking at an early age is the perfect way to pass on the normality of cooking to the next generation.
Find a new writing book with blank pages and start your own recipe book collection. Start to collect recipes you like and add them to your own recipe books, cut out and paste pictures if you like.
Avoid meals and websites that advocate a thousand ingredients for the dish before you can even begin. Too many ingredients in a recipe mean you’re more likely to be left with a lot of ingredients you won’t need again, leading to more waste.
Good food doesn’t have to be complicated.
Start children eating what the rest of the family eat as soon as you can (unless they have a dietary restrictions). Children do what you do, and if they eat different meals, they’l think that’s how it is.
No one is born not liking fruit, vegetables soups or stews, or chocolate for that matter.
If they’re used to eating nose to tail from an early age, then it’s the norm for the rest of their lives. Learning to cook also means learning how to cook with leftovers.
Dedicating one of your new recipe books entirely to dishes you can make from leftovers from your family’s favourite meals, means you’ll throw away less food and save money too.
Using ingredients in new ways is something to think about. Who said that lettuce was just for salads? Use them cooked in a stir fry.
Got a left-over carrot? Grate it and use it in overnight oats for breakfast.
Make a smoothie with those broccoli stalks you usually throw straight in the bin, add that little bit of red pepper you were going to get rid of too, with a spoonful of peanut butter and honey you’ve got for a tasty on the go breakfast.
What about left over root vegetables? A spicy coleslaw is great using grated swede, celeriac, carrots and radishes (don’t limit yourself t just these). Making a dressing of mayonnaise mustard and lemon juice will add a little bit of wow to leftovers.
Don’t get rid of that stale slice of bread. Stale bread makes great bread and butter puddings, or some amazing croutons by just drizzling with oil and adding some dried herbs and spices. Eat them with soups, or store in an airtight container to nibble on while watching a movie. Make leftover bread into breadcrumbs, mix them with herbs and that little bit of leftover cheese and coat fish or chicken thighs.
Get the whole family involved in tea time by flattening the stale bread and use as a base for homemade pizza, a great way of using up left-overs from the fridge
Of course, there are always curries, pies and soups, all a great way of using food you might otherwise get rid of. But even with these you can use up other leftovers too.
Add leftover rice or pasta to your soup and don’t throw that parmesan rind away. It’s perfect for the soup you’ve just made. It adds a delicious umami flavour that will become so addictive it won’t be long before you’re adding it as a main ingredient.
It’s the same with leftover cream, creme fresh or plain yoghurts. Using them in your curries and soup is probably obvious, but what about as a base for salad dressings or some two ingredients flatbreads.
Mix plain yoghurt and self-raising flour together, roll out and dry frying them so you can scoop up that great curry you’ve just made.
Anything that will let me eat with my hands is a winner for me.
Get creative with burgers, not just what goes in the burger patty but what you have on top too. One of my favourites for a Monday tea time with Mr G, is making a little bit of bubble and squeak using left over mashed potatoes and veg from our Sunday roast, topping my burger with it and then adding a nice runny fried egg. I can almost feel it running down my chin as I’m writing this. Maybe that’s what I’m going to have tonight, I need to check my fridge.
Are you puling your hair out yet with all this reading? I think I might make a downloadable sheet of creative cooking ideas so you can print it off and keep as a reference, otherwise this piece of writing will go on, and on, and on ……...
The last point in my five-point plan to take over the world, otherwise known as reducing food waste on my birthday is, to reassess and change what we traditionally think of as food waste.
I guess this also pairs with the learning to cook point, but rethinking what we class as waste is what stopping food waste in all about.
For instance, the leaves of a lot of vegetables are edible so why as a society don’t we use them in our cooking? I’m not a food historian so I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer this question, only to say that one of my most hated phrases springs to mind.
“We do it like this because we’ve always done it like this.”
Let’s start to change that and begin using parts of our food that has customarily been referred to as waste, and start to call it food instead.
Leaves, leaves and more leaves than you probably realise, and certainly more than are seen as food in supermarkets are edible .
Here are just a few edible leaves that can be used in all of our cooking, remember what I said earlier, leaves to roots?
The leaves of green beans, beetroot, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, celery, sweetcorn, pumpkin and sweet potato are all edible. We eat cabbage without blinking an eye, so why not the leaves of these plants? As well as cooking with them and using them in salads, use them to make things such as pesto or a stir fry with a difference.
If this isn’t for you, find a gardening society or a farm near you, and give them all to feed animals, or for an allotment for compost to help grow the next crop.
Surprisingly when I asked the lovey Mr G to name some food we wasted, tea and coffee grounds where nowhere on his list. I’m guessing if I asked you the same, you’d probably over look them too.
In Britain we drink 165 million cups of tea a day, with an estimated 70 million cups of coffee a day. Tea bags and coffee grounds are great for compost, and with that many cups drunk each day, that’s a lot of compost.
As you can see, just by thinking creatively and not being restricted by what and how we cook, can make a huge difference in an effort to stop food waste.
I try very hard to post recipes that people will like to eat and cook for themselves, but I’m always aware of how many ingredients I use too.
At the end of the recipes, in the Tip Box, there is often a way of using up any leftover ingredients and most of the dishes can be frozen.
Preaching is not what this site is about. It’s about cooking, having fun and enjoying my sweet life, but if I didn’t write something about Stop Food Waste Day with a view to get people thinking about food differently, especially with the way I cook and share that here with you, I’d feel as though I was letting myself down.
Thanks for listening, now normal services will resume.
Enjoy Your Sweet Life.
All the colours of the rainbow
