Food Waste

 Food waste is a surprisingly big hitter on Climate Change.  Whenever we grow unused food, we're wasting all the carbon cost of growing it, and also losing the advantages that could be gained if the land was restored to nature.

• In the UK 7 million tonnes of food is thrown away by households every year, that’s around a third of all the food we buy. If we stopped wasting food it would have the same impact on carbon emissions as taking 1.8 million cars off UK roads.

But food waste is also hard one to reduce.  There are many different causes of food waste, and each of them requires a different approach.  It requires many small changes in habits and it's easy to forget, or not want to take the extra  time to write out a shopping list - but there's more than one motivator.  Imagine if you could reduce your food bill by a third....

See the12daysofcop.wordpress.com/cut-food-waste/ for additional tips to those given here.

There are things that we can do.  None of them are easy as it tends to take time and effort to change habits, especially when they're things we do regularly.

Use leftovers rather than throwing them away.

- this one is always hard for me to wrap my brain around.  Apparently, there are people who don't eat leftovers for supper/breakfast/lunch the next day.  All I can say is that there weren't any in the family I grew up in, and there aren't any in my family either.  My mother would have been horrified, and so would I.

Make a shopping list so you don't buy things you don't need - my husband does the two-weekly main  shop, and he always goes round the kitchen beforehand checking what we're short of, and makes a list.  Has done so for many years.  It makes financial sense, and saves trying to cram too much into cupboards.  (and yet, the odd thing, is that we're never short when people are out panic-buying.  People don't panic buy tins of haricot beans, and they don't go off either...  Same goes for nuts and other veggie staples.)

• Get in the habit of freezing milk, bread or leftovers that you won’t use straight away.
• Milk is surprisingly the most significant contributor to avoidable carbon emissions, followed by bread.

We don't do this one.  (Well apart from surplus allotment produce). That's because we don't buy more than we need in the first place, so we don't end up with stuff running close to its use-by date.  And we eat the leftovers....
(If your find your milk regularly goes off, check your fridge temperature - According to the UK food standards agency, the ideal fridge temperature for food is 8°C and below. Taking into account the temperature drop from the opening and closing of the fridge door, the fridge should be set at a temperature between 1-5°C.)
 

• I'd also suggest having a small fridge (unless you have a lot of people in the house).  The bigger the fridge, the more likely you are to have stuff tucked away at the back that gets forgotten and goes past its date.




Challenge - Can you eat everything you buy for a week?  Two weeks? How long can you go without throwing away any food?

Challenge 2 - Can you buy the food that would normally be wasted before it ever gets to you?  How about those wonky spuds, undersized pears, etc.?  (We get our fruit and veg from Riverford, and they include these as part of their normal supply. The tiny Conference pears this week are very tasty.)