Food Waste

[watervole]

 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.)

Comments

[ranunculus]

I've struggled with this one. So often in the past I've made a nice meal and then had to go off and work so I wasn't home to eat the leftovers. Doing a bit better now but...

[watervole]

I can see the problem. I guess the best option is to pop it in the freezer if it's the kind of thing that freezes well. Or pack lunch?

[ranunculus]

I froze a LOT of stuff, but leftovers left in the frige and my chaotic schedule really were a challenge.

[lexin]

This is an area where I really don't do so well. I'm largely no longer able to make food from raw ingredients, and I sometimes buy things it turns out I end up not eating. I'm not a good housekeeper, my maternal grandmother (who was a cook/housekeeper before she married) would be ashamed.

[catalenamara]

I can't cook from scratch anymore, either. Old injuries are taking a big toll. I was never Miss Merry Housemaker, but I used to at least do the basics. Most of my energy these days goes into my job. I do my best, as I hate wasting both money and food, but things do slip by me.

[watervole]

It's definitely harder as we get older and frailer.

[catalenamara]

I lost all mobility in both feet and my left ankle by the time I was 50, due to injuries from high school P.E. classes - I would have been in my mid-teens. Now, it's difficult for even a trained medical professional to look at an X-ray of my left ankle and see the dividing line where there used to be two bones. My podiatrist told me that, because of my bone structure, I should never in my life done high impact exercise - that's what caused the initial damage. I've been advised to avoid standing and walking as much as possible for the rest of my life, because of the danger of further injury. Earlier on in my life, I made a point of doing everything I possibly could that required a lot of walking, because even then I recognized at some point it would become significantly more difficult to do.

[watervole]

Ouch.

Half the reason I dance every chance I get is because I know I have ten years at most of being able continue doing so.

Morris enables me to keep fit, but there comes a point when even old morris dancers have to stop dancing.

And when that happens, my hypermobility is likely to result in almost continuous pain...

[watervole]

It's certainly a lot harder for single people and people with disabilities.

[davidcook]

We turn any leftovers that aren't going to be eaten into eggs ... thanks to our chickens :)
Scraps get composted, leftovers that might be eaten go into the chest freezer.
We usually don't end up throwing any food out, unless we've forgotten a use-by date on something sitting at the back of the fridge ...

[watervole]

Sounds like you're doing really well on the food waste front.

the only suggestion I can make is a once a week check of the back of the fridge!

[igenlode]

My fridge is large and almost entirely full of fresh food. (I really miss having a larder; now that it's getting colder I shall have the option of keeping things in the bathroom with the window open again, which just doesn't work in summer when the sun comes directly in!)

Quick fridge audit:
Shelf 1: eggs, cheese, a very elderly tub of emergency margarine, a bowl of lemon juice from half a lemon where the recipe required only the rind, a tub of dripping, half a dried saucisson, half a yellow squash
Shelf 2: half an onion, half a courgette, a leek, Brussels sprouts, a helping of pudding left over from Sunday, creme fraiche, half a punnet of raspberries
Shelf 3: two jars of home-made lemon curd, a jar of goat's cheese preserved in oil, a jar of pickled gherkins, a jar of pickled garlic salad, three-quarters of a cucumber, a bowl holding half a tin of chopped tomatoes (opened yesterday to make a very tasty goulash), half a chilli, half a swede, another lemon wrapped up with the rind grated off from the same recipe, a bag of small oranges given to me by a friend.

Drawer 1: carrots, garlic, half a white cabbage
Drawer 2: small yellow peppers, celery, beetroot, courgettes

In the door: my last remaining half-packet of butter (I haven't been able to get any in the market for a month...), 2 whole lemons, jars of apricot, bramble and strawberry jam, half a tube of tomato puree, another bag of small oranges (bought by me) and a pot of sourdough starter.

I think the thing that has been in there longest is the margarine (bought August 2020), and after that the pickles. Most of the rest consists of partially-used ingredients; whole root vegetables mostly live in the vegetable rack, but citrus fruit keeps much better chilled.

The only thing that's in any danger of getting forgotten about is the lemon juice, which is in a rather nondescript covered bowl; I did use some in salad yesterday.

Leftovers are in the freezer, along with the home-made cake, portions of meat etc. -- save in this case for the date and walnut pudding, which as a steamed suet pudding I felt was unlikely to go stale before it gets eaten!

---

I almost never throw away food (I had to throw away the outer segments of an onion yesterday because when I cut into it I found that there was a rotten layer; sometimes they just go off in storage. The inside was still all right.) Practically nothing I buy ever 'goes past its date', because generally speaking it doesn't come with a datestamp on it (I did notice that tin of tomatoes was date-stamped December 2021, although frankly I'm sure it would have been fine ten years later). I have to use my own judgement about when food is fit to eat, which generally defaults to 'if it's stale, then put it in a recipe as quickly as possible'. I use things up once I have cut into them, and where possible buy them in self-preserving format so that they can hang around for a long time being used little bit by little bit, e.g. dried sausage and preserved goat's cheese instead of fresh. (Smoked Mozzarella is surprisingly practical, as well, although it's vastly more expensive -- at least you aren't constrained into using it up within days of purchase.)

I do get given unwanted food from time to time; the extra oranges were market surplus and the walnuts in the pudding were a batch that had fallen off the stall into the mud (but perfectly fine once shelled!) I have a bag of apples from a local farm which are rather smaller than the commercially-available ones I get from the greengrocer, which I find useful for snacking -- the 'full-size' apples are larger than anything I've ever seen growing on a tree, and can be a little overwhelming...

[igenlode]

Actually, the thing that's been in there longest is the sourdough -- I've lost track of quite how many years old this batch is and only know that it's my third, after the first two succumbed at length to unfortunate accidents :-p

[eledonecirrhosa]

There's no such thing as leftovers! I cook something with the full intention of eating it 2 or 3 days in a row. Or I do a mega-huge batch in the slow cooker with the intention of freezing a couple of portions as well as eating it for the next 3 days.

I throw away hardly any food waste, which is just as well, since the council doesn't collect food waste from our flats.

Though I did misread the oven temperature on some Quorn fillets the other day and accidentally turned them from food into charcoal! :-) Those were sadly inedible and had to be chucked out.

I'm now wondering what the difference in energy consumption is between (a) cooking fresh main meal + pasta/rice/potato, (b) reheating main in microwave + cooking more pasta/rice/potato, and (c) reheating both main & pasta/rice/potato in microwave.

[watervole]

No food waste collection? Dark ages... It needs to be kept out of general waste or it will just end up in landfill.

You sound really well organised :)

A handy reference. Potatoes have a much lower footprint than rice. Rice is grown in paddy fields which emit methane.

Pasta isn't as bad, but spuds come out best.

You shouldn't reheat rice unless you are fully aware of the food poisoning risk - read https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/food-and-diet/can-reheating-rice-cause-food-poisoning/

Microwaves are more efficient that ovens, so reheating would win over cooking a new meal - as long as you avoid rice (for both CO2 and food poisoning reasons).

[eledonecirrhosa]

Thanks for being concerned about the rice reheating. I'm aware of the risk and make sure the extra rice goes in the fridge asap. I've also given up on brown rice, because 40 minutes to cook it is too time and energy hungry compared to 12 mins for white rice.

Recycling is pants on our street. They don't take food waste. They don't take cardboard. They empty the paper recycling bin once in a blue moon, so it fills up to bursting.

I had a smart meter installed yesterday, so I can now swoon at the amount of energy used when I put the kettle on. :-) It's already making me more careful about switching out lights when wandering about the house.

Another tip was a radio programme where a lady said you don't need to do the "preheat the oven for 15 minutes" for most things. Instead you just add 3 to 5 minutes to the cooking time. I've tried that and it works brilliantly.

[word_geek]

I'm pretty good about most leftovers. My kryptonite is crusts of bread - none of us actually like them, so they are tricky to use up. Sad veg mostly gets souped or stocked, and one of the joys of working from home is that I get to cook at lunchtime, so the ends of rice and so on become stir fry or whatever.

We've Riverford-ed for so long that they once gave us a free gift for the number of orders we'd had through them, and the only issue with doing so is that since we moved out of the block of flats, we've not been able to pass the stuff we don't like much onto the neighbours. It has taught me how to cook several veg that I previously thought I didn't like, though.

Edit to add: Milk is a weird one - Alex and I both struggle to digest milk, at least uncooked, so we have oat milk and soy milk in. Milk from cows is bought solely for our kid's benefit, and their consumption varies wildly according to whether they are drinking lattes or on a cereal kick. However, they will always eat pancakes, so if it looks like we won't use the milk in time, I make up a jug of mix and store that in the fridge. We've never failed to use it all up, either as pancake, toad in the hole or Yorkshire puds. But mostly pancake, which is helpfully forgiving of iffy milk. I think I made soda bread or scones with a bottle that had gone a bit further, too, come to think of it.

H

[pensnest]

Maybe you could freeze the crusts and use them whenever you need breadcrumbs? Hmm, I should try this myself, I never seem to have stale-ish bread when I want breadcrumbs.

My grandma used to swear by using sour milk to make scones.

[word_geek]

That's the thing - I never make stuff with breadcrumbs. Not sure why, but we just don't. A couple of the au pairs did, but those were not recipes that made the transfer to my list of regular dishes.

I think it's because it's just so easy to use a frozen version of breaded chicken or fish that I never need to make them from scratch.

[watervole]

Can you throw small cubes of the crusts into the veg soups?

We use oat milk ourselves.

My mum used to make scones with milk that was about to go off. They were lovely!

[damerell]

I'm sure I don't throw away a third of the food I buy, so there must be a Spiders George somewhere who's letting the side down.

More seriously, of this list, I have had no success freezing milk (which is vexing because I want white coffee but even a pint will turn before I drink enough coffee). On thawing it seperates into its constituent bits. In particular I tried making "milk cubes" for coffee and even after stirring vigorously, the resulting coffee clearly wasn't right.

[watervole]

Have you tried 'barista' oat milk? I haven't, but I wonder if that would survive freezing?

[damerell]

TBH, I have not found any ersatz milk at all satisfactory (albeit the last time I tried was pre-plague, since friends have it) and as I understand it it's the same fats that make milk milky and do funny things while frozen, so any alternative either won't be milky or won't freeze.

At the moment Clare visits every fortnight and brings a pint of milk then, and since she wants more milk in coffee [1] and there's two of us, we use it up in time and then I have black coffee after that.

[1] My coffee machine has a thermos jug instead of a hotplate - ingenious, and it means the first mug of coffee is hotter. Since I like white and black coffee, I put milk in that one to make it cool enough to drink.

[watervole]

I know some oat milk is formulated so it won't separate in hot drinks, so that's why I wondered if it would freeze.

Most oat milk will curdle in coffee, but not the 'barista' stuff.

but your solution is much simpler!