What can be done to reduce food waste?

SailorSam

culpepper wrote: »

5. I seem to remember that Pig farmers were given the left overs from school dinners to feed the livestock. Could that not be readopted?

I think that may have been stopped because of ... 'Foot & Mouth',
It's was ok and feed pig-swill which only consisted of old veges, but when it may have been processed meats the pigs could have caught diseases.

grandmasam

Education from starting school is key, I believe.
As the eldest of 5,mum taught us all, as we got old enough to stand on stool to 'help', to prepare, make and cook all sorts. From a soup and rice pudding, to sunday roast and cakes, bread and biscuits.
I married a farmer in 1965, and living far enough away from the main road and the bus into town, 10 miles away, soon learnt to preserve, make jam, chutney etc with the freebies from the hedges.
In turn, I have taught each of my 4 children and 9 grandchildren to become competent in at least the basics of making food from scratch,using up whatever leftover bits in the fridge.
My granddaughter, 13, is scathing about the food tech she does at school,she admits that she, and some of the rest of the class learn nothing,except, first go shopping!
Bring cookery, budgeting for meals,and ways to use up leftovers back into schools. We have already lost a generation who are unable to do this.
Sorry for a long post,
Caz

cbrown372

Bring back Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food where the orignal premise was he taught 2 people some basic recipes then those 2 taught a further 2 people and so on. The series was good but as always there was an element of judgemental people who pointed out the size of the TV and the amount spent on take aways, not really helpful.

The cook book on the back of the series was well recommended on here for basic recipes and still is for newbies (no matter their age) to cooking.

http://www.jamieoliver.com/jamies-ministry-of-food/

My council, in Scotland, has food waste bins that are picked up weekly and when you put it in to a separate bin its quite frightening when I see what food I can waste in a week.

thriftwizard

Good luck with this one, OPs! I must admit I sat down to add a few suggestions to the excellent suggestions up above (which I will do below) but then I started thinking: the key to this is to make it undesirable for people to buy more food than they need, to make the best of what they do have, and not to waste what they do buy. But if you succeed in this, what will that do to the economy? The idea isn't going to go down at all well with the supermarkets or the food-processing giants...

I'm writing as one who has received more than one letter from our council, pointing out that I haven't been putting our food waste bin out. My replies that we don't actually have any food waste have evidently fallen on deaf ears. I'm feeding 7 adults, all with definite & wildly differing tastes, on one salary and whatever pittance I can earn as a part-time market trader, in order to let our adult kids try to save up for homes of their own. I buy carefully, as much as possible fresh & from local sources, and not necessarily the cheapest, as that isn't always the best value. Not all food gets eaten, and there are cores, bones, shells & peelings to deal with too, but we have three ways of disposing of the bits I really can't recycle into another dish. We have a Green Cone digester which takes the really tough bits; bones, meat waste and the like. We have several compost heaps, although our garden isn't very big, but we like to grow fresh herbs, fruit & salad-y things. And we have 12 chickens, which would eat almost anything given half a chance. So I do know whereof I speak...

I too would emphasise education. People's knowledge of how to cook, and confidence, is at an all-time low. But one of my market-trader friends is an ex-Domestic Science teacher who has to live on pension credit & keep her adult daughter, only recently diagnosed with Ehlers-Danloss Syndrome, unable to work but previously not eligible for any benefits at all. The jams, marmalades & chutneys my friend turns out from fruit that's yellow-stickered, begged from people's gardens & hedges, and foraged from park edges are legendary around here. People buy one jar, then come back the next week for ten, and her cakes are to die for, all made on an absolute pittance from basic ingredients but with a sound knowledge & understanding of her subject. Knowledge which most people no longer have, but it allows her & her daughter to "grow" their tiny budget a little & eat reasonably well. Every year both she & I are horrified to see folk throwing out bags and boxes of plums & apples; the usual excuses are, "We don't know what variety they are" or "They just attract wasps", my ex-sister-in-law mistook her rhubarb plant for a weed, and as for Japonica quinces, I could fill my garage shelves with quince marmalade every year as most people seem to think they're poisonous! Lack of knowledge & confidence leads to good food going to waste...

People need time to plan & shop effectively, and prepare & cook food properly, but in this pressurised world of commuting, full time work, hunting for Pokemon & recreational shopping, there isn't a lot to spare for that. No easy answers there! Except perhaps to somehow make people see wasting food as immoral & repugnant?

I also think that the practice of building homes with next-to-no storage for food, or space for preparing it, should be discouraged. Kitchens in new-builds have got smaller & smaller, but two feet of worktop just isn't enough space to cook properly, forcing frustrated people to buy ping-cuisine or takeaways, which always seem to result in wastage. My mother's kitchen in her retirement flat doesn't even have a window with natural light, never mind enough work-surface; no wonder she doesn't cook for herself any more. And the health service is bearing the cost of her poor nutrition, IMHO...

You have a hard task ahead, encouraging several generations who have grown up to believe that preparing & cooking food for oneself is a) beneath them b) so difficult that only celebrity chefs can do it properly c) unduly time-consuming & d) potentially fatal, to discover otherwise!

Owain_Moneysaver

Cappella wrote: »

Tax ready meals heavily. There is no incentive for anyone to learn to cook from scratch if heavily processed, high fat, high sugar content, ready meals are cheaper than the alternative option.

To be fair, there's a lot less waste with ready meals and many of them contain the wonky veg that the supermarkets wouldn't sell. They are also already very expensive compared with cooking from scratch - if you are cooking for a family or can batch cook and freeze.

The days of mum at home cooking every meal are gone; there are many more single people working longer hours, and many families where all the adults work*, and if we didn't have ready meals we'd be eating egg and chips for dinner, or rissoles, or other things from the 1950s which were best left behind.

*there are also many families where no adults work and they have no excuse for not whizzing up a vegetable soup for lunch ...

moneyistooshorttomention

As I understand it - there are still many households where the men arent "pulling their weight" re the household chores (including cooking) and, rather than argue about it, the women are accepting that they spend more time on paid work & housework than the men do and thus buying ready meals to try and ensure the balance isnt even worse.

But then - there is no government solution to that particular problem.....:cool::(

lillibet_dripping

I've just remembered something ... when I was at primary school (in the late 60's) every child had a school dinner. There was no such thing as a 'packed lunch'. This meal was home-cooked and we all ate, 10 to a long table, all together. The teachers had a table at the end of the dining hut and had the same meal. EVERYTHING on the plate had to be eaten - no if's and but's, and you would all sit there until everyone had cleaned their plates. Sometimes the meat was fatty and I still can't eat cold custard to this day. But we learnt that food was not something to be thrown away on a whim.
Fast forward 50 years to my last job in a primary school and the children eat off of 'airline' trays with compartments for the main, pud and cutlery. They have a few mouthfuls, then throw the rest in the bin. At going home time mums turn up at the school gate with crisps and chocolate because their kids appear to be hungry!!!
*wanders off to make another cup of tea and ponder*

lillibet_dripping

Oh yes, I've just remembered what I came on to say in the first place.
This thread has so far had 1,888 views and only 48 replies. Maybe people just can't be bothered stressing over throwing food away - after all, there's plenty more where it came from......

thriftwizard

lillibet_dripping wrote: »

Oh yes, I've just remembered what I came on to say in the first place.
This thread has so far had 1,888 views and only 48 replies. Maybe people just can't be bothered stressing over throwing food away - after all, there's plenty more where it came from......

For now... but who knows what might be around the corner, on a personal level, a national level or even a world-wide one? Things completely outside our control can and do sometimes happen, some of them pretty much unpredictable except in hindsight.

On the other hand, maybe some of the readers have gone away to think about it more carefully? My instinct was to dash off a quick reply, but then I realised the issue was rather more complicated than it first appeared. And even after thinking about it whilst doing the washing-up, other things have occurred to me overnight. The posters who have picked up on food waste on the industrial scale are quite right to do so; if your local supermarket is visibly wasting entire skips full of food on a daily basis, why should we worry about tossing one pack of ham that's two days past its sell-by, especially if we're worried that somehow it might be concealing invisible but deadly germs?

moneyistooshorttomention

lillibet_dripping wrote: »

I've just remembered something ... when I was at primary school (in the late 60's) every child had a school dinner. There was no such thing as a 'packed lunch'. This meal was home-cooked and we all ate, 10 to a long table, all together. The teachers had a table at the end of the dining hut and had the same meal. EVERYTHING on the plate had to be eaten - no if's and but's, and you would all sit there until everyone had cleaned their plates. Sometimes the meat was fatty and I still can't eat cold custard to this day. But we learnt that food was not something to be thrown away on a whim.
Fast forward 50 years to my last job in a primary school and the children eat off of 'airline' trays with compartments for the main, pud and cutlery. They have a few mouthfuls, then throw the rest in the bin. At going home time mums turn up at the school gate with crisps and chocolate because their kids appear to be hungry!!!
*wanders off to make another cup of tea and ponder*

I remember having school meals like that in the 1960s. I think children were allowed to have packed lunches instead if they chose? - as my school was pretty modern (even before it amalgamated with the local secondary modern and became a comprehensive). After amalgamation it was VERY modern and I very much doubt we were all made to have the same meal regardless.

It wouldnt be possible nowadays - as individuals now need to be catered for (vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, there could be problems with demands for halal food, etc, etc).

Add just how much in the way of snack food many children get these days and some of them might go from "fat" to "fatter".

So - those days are gone...