The average family in the UK apparently throws food worth £730 in the bin every year.
How do we do this without meaning to? It’s a disaster for the environment and not great for the household budget either.
This week is Food Waste Action Week, organised by Love Food Hate Waste. Their website is full of great advice on how to reduce food waste. The adverts - shown here in the blog - illustrate how the contents of a humble food waste caddy are turned into energy or fertiliser.
Food waste falls into two camps - avoidable and unavoidable.
Avoidable food waste
Producing food waste unnecessarily is usually the result of lack of forward planning, which leads to shopping on automatic pilot. But a bit of time spent thinking ahead is well worth the effort.
- Plan meals for the week, taking into account how many people will be eating. It's also worth noticing if you have a tendency to make too much 'just in case'. Start to notice how much people actually eat.
- Reuse leftovers – there are excellent recipe books and online guides to give you ideas.
- When you have time, batch cook and freeze portions. Having good freezable containers in different sizes makes this easier.
- Check out apps and influencers for advice on how to shop smartly, not blindly.
- Don’t dismiss small steps – together they make a big difference, as the tips (below) from Nancy Birtwhistle show.
Unavoidable food waste
With the best will in the world, ordinary mortals who aren’t into eating eggshells or tealeaves, will have some unavoidable food waste.
The best way to deal with this is of course to rely on Mother Nature’s brilliant recycling system – composting. Check out our range of composters here.
Surprisingly, the EvenGreener team all live in local authority areas that have extended deadlines for separate food waste collections. So if we didn’t compost, our waste would be going to incineration or landfill for a few more years yet. But even when we do have council collections, we’ll still keeeeeep composting (with apologies to Strictly).
10 easy tips to cut food waste
These tips - taken from Nancy Birtwhistle’s best-selling book Green Living Made Easy - are easy to incorporate into your everyday routine.
1. Thyme to save herbs
To double the life of shop-bought fresh herbs: dampen a double-thickness sheet of kitchen paper with cold water. Lay on it either parsley, coriander, dill, thyme, rosemary or mint after removing from the packet. Roll loosely so that all the sprigs are surrounded by a cold, damp blanket, then pop in an airtight box and keep in the fridge.
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2. Freeze cheese please
To avoid cheese becoming hard and dry: buy a large slab of cheese – cut the block into 100g pieces. Put one block back in the original pack to use this week, then put the remaining pieces in a container in the freezer. Then for the next few weeks you have cheese that can be grated or used once thawed in the fridge for an hour or so.
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3. Take stock of veggies
The best way to accumulate sufficient veggie bits for a stock is to keep a large plastic box or bag in the freezer and pop into it the ends of celery, parsley stalks, trimmings from onions, carrots, parsnips, pea pods, leeks and any other tasty veg. Once you have a large box or bagful, place in a large pan and simmer for half an hour or in a slow cooker for several hours. Strain, keep in the fridge for five days or freeze to be used later as a base for casseroles, soups, pie fillings and stews.
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4. Piece of cake
Use a roll of reusable baking parchment instead of new greaseproof paper every time you bake. Use the bases of your favourite cake tins as a template, then cut the reusable parchment to size. Wash between uses.
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5. Bag-tastic
The plastic liners in cereal boxes can be used to separate almost anything and make a good alternative to cling film. If you unpeel the seams of the bag this can then be used for pastry rolling. They also make good bread bags and freezer bags, sandwich wraps and for using in lunch boxes and picnics.
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6. Don’t shell out on eggs
Many baking recipes call for only egg yolk or egg whites, leaving leftovers of both. Egg whites freeze beautifully (for up to a year) and thaw in a bowl at room temperature in an hour or so.
Egg yolks can be frozen but need a light sprinkle of salt or sugar to prevent them going rubbery. Nancy rarely freezes yolks, instead making a quick lemon curd using the yolks, sugar, butter, lemon juice and zest. Stir on a low heat for several minutes until the mix slowly thickens. Store in a clean jar in the fridge.
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7. Scrap happy
Packs of bacon can lead to waste if a couple of rashers are left in the packet to dry up and go off before you know it. Instead, keep a small box of cooked scraps in the freezer. Cook the random rashes until crispy. Break them up into small pieces and pop them in a box to save in the freezer. Use these scraps as a pizza topping, stirred into pasta or sprinkled over salads.
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8. Spice of life
Nancy buys ginger or lemongrass only once or twice a year, keeping them in a plastic box in the freezer. She breaks ginger root into chunks and grates both the skin and flesh from frozen, then puts the unused root back into the box for next time.
She also freezes chillies and uses them from frozen. With lemongrass – trim the root ends and leaves, then freeze and slice from frozen to use.
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9. The besto pesto
Did you know that nettles have more vitamins and nutrients than many other green veggies? The sting is destroyed by blanching. Wear rubber gloves to handle them. Bring a pan of water to the boil, then add the leaves. Have a bowl of cold water at the ready. Blanch the leaves in boiling water for 30 seconds then use tongs to remove them and plunge into cold water to halt the cooking process. Drain the leaves, dry on a clean cotton towel and squeeze as much water out as you can. Whizz in a blender with parmesan, garlic, nuts, lemon juice, salt, pepper, olive oil. Freeze in an ice cube tray.
It’s a good idea to also freeze leftover shop-bought pesto in an ice cube tray, since it needs to be used within five days of opening.
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10. Chit chat
Save egg boxes for potato chitting (encouraging them to sprout). The cardboard moulds keep potatoes upright, the soft material doesn’t damage the shoots and the open design offers plenty of light.