What can be done to reduce food waste?

moneyistooshorttomention

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......

On the other hand it's "preaching to the choir" to speak to us all re food waste - as it's probably something there would be 100% agreement on on a Board like this.

Probably lots of people reading are thinking "I think the Government should do so-and-so - but I won't bother to say so - because someone else has already made that point".

I guess the Government researcher came on here in the first place precisely because there is such unanimous agreement about food waste and they are looking for practical proposals they can put forward. We've given them some already - there may be others to come...

missbiggles1

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......

I think some people's attitudes to not wasting anythingcan be pretty intimidating to the rest of us.

I waste very little food (even the dogs don't get a lot of scraps) but I'm really not going to feel guilty about throwing away a couple of slices of stale bread every couple of weeks or half a stick of celery. Sometimes life really is too short.

Soworried

In my area we have a very good food swap scheme ran on social media. If you are going to not use a tin of bashed beans etc you post it and people can come and collect it. Even OOD fresh veg can be given.
I'd like to see schemes like that readily known about and all over the UK.

Knowledge is the key really. I see people at work go to throw out the coffee grind powder from the bottom of the coffee maker who will then go and buy coffee flavoured essence or coffee flour for baking at an extortionate rate. It is the SAME thing, they are conning you due to lack of knowledge.

We have to get people to start cooking again from scratch with seasonal foods. They cost pennies and are much healthier for you and the environment.

A food waste cost app should be set up like the sugar reducing one. Where you scan the bar code of the item you waste and it keeps a running cost total.

As for my own waste, food wise we really have no waste, we compost the peelings that we don't turn in to soup or crisps and I weigh out all our servings so there really are no left overs.
I do need to find an alternative to dog poo bags as I currently buy the cheapest and they are not sustainable.

moneyistooshorttomention

Well - I try to be careful about what I chuck - but the last week has seen me having to throw out a few pieces of chocolate brownie (errrmm...my fault...I hadnt realised cake could "go off" - as I so rarely make it:o). Cue for thinking "I can spot a couple of little bits of white mould on that - darn = in the bin".

I was annoyed about having to throw a bit out because of an accident though. I'd tried out a "not so much a recipe - more a method" idea of pouring some yogurt with a bit of sweetening in it into a container, put some frozen berries and pumpkin seeds on top and frozen it. Took the first bit out of the freezer some hours later and had that and it was luverly. Went to take the rest out of the freezer the next day and it had gone so rock hard that my attempts to break it into segments as per recipe failed miserably and it headed for the floor rather than my plate. Duh! - and that was the second bit of food waste for the week (as it obviously had to go into the bin):(. Darn - as I'd been looking forward to that - as it was tasty.

suki1964

missbiggles1 wrote: »

I think some people's attitudes to not wasting anythingcan be pretty intimidating to the rest of us.

I waste very little food (even the dogs don't get a lot of scraps) but I'm really not going to feel guilty about throwing away a couple of slices of stale bread every couple of weeks or half a stick of celery. Sometimes life really is too short.

I understand that feeling

When I first came to these boards there really was a sack cloth and ashes attitude to making the most of everything and throwing nothing away. When I first found these boards I thought I was pretty frugal, till I read some of the threads here

I do try not to throw away food and having a dog, hens and composting does help, but I do throw some away, I am after all human and sometimes that bit of whatever has been saved in the fridge just isn't appetising any longer and gets shoved to the back and forgotten about.

Tomatoes and beets usually. Forever finding shrivelled or white dotted beets and toms in the fridge, forgotten, unloved and unwanted lol. And coleslaw. Always those bits for some reason.

Oh and today the last of a batch of cookies I made a week or so ago. No doubt I could crush them into a base to make cheesecake, but then in two of three days I'd have cheesecake heading to the bin :rotfl:

Yes life is too short to worry about scraps here and there. It's the buying of food that's never going to get used (cos someone wanted a takeaway instead for instance or it seemed like a good idea at the time type purchase ) going straight in the bin which really is wasteful

All the same, no matter how much food a household wastes , it's a spit in the ocean compared to what's wasted at point of harvest

Seeing fields of crops being ploughed back into the fields because they are rejected by the supermarkets is quite heartbreaking. its also in my mind totally immoral.

The world population is growing. Arable land is shrinking. Food is now being grown in columns so that we get the yield we need from less acreage. Many parts of the world are having major crop failures due to drought or floods year in and year out. Yet we supposedly won't buy 'imperfect' fruit and veg so we destroy it

[Deleted User]

thriftwizard wrote: »

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!

One of the best posts about it I have seen Well done thriftwizard on such a well written reply.

At the moment our local council do supply small food waste bins but also sell for £1.25 a packet of bags to go in them :eek: As I virtually have no food waste at all, I never use it.

My egg shells go either round my plants in my garden, or my friends, as it helps to keep the slugs off plants.

Very few bones as I like to make as much as possible stock from the bones for soup.

I'm afraid I would be extremely rude to any council official who asked me the whys and wherefores of what I put in my bin I would be inclined to tell him where to stick his little bin included.

As for the idea that folk in the 1950s lived on egg and chips and rissoles, nothing could be further from the truth, my late Mum never made a chip in her life, she disliked them so they were rarely in our house and we certainly didn't live on them when I grew up in the 1940s-50s.
Rissoles were usually only made to use up the last scraps of any joint that we were lucky enough to get hold of

LameWolf

thriftwizard wrote: »

I also think that the practice of building homes with next-to-no storage for food, or space for preparing it, should be discouraged.

That is a very good point. Our little bungalow was built in the mid 1970's and actually has a reasonably sized kitchen; and when we had it refitted a couple of years ago, I did my very best to fit in as much cupboard space as humanly possible. And still I find myself playing Cupboard Tetris because there's not really enough food storage space! I'd so love a walk-in larder like my grandmother had......

JackieO wrote: »

I'm afraid I would be extremely rude to any council official who asked me the whys and wherefores of what I put in my bin I would be inclined to tell him where to stick his letter bin included.

I'd give him a helping hand to get it there, too..... Sideways!
We do have what we call the "compost caddy" which carrot tops, tomato stalks, apple cores, that sort of stuff goes in - to later be put in the compost bin.
No bones etc because we don't have meat.
I carefully cook the right amount for dinner, so no leftovers; and, like you JackieO I can make "bendy-veg soup" should the need arise.

Our "food waste" is collected along with the garden waste, and the only food item I've put in for months and months was a watermelon rind.

Thrift

In response to lillibet dripping's comment regarding the number of viewings for this post against the actual responses maybe others, like myself, are using the direct response avenue given in the OP. I have returned to this thread several times to see what has been posted, too, as I am sure have others. It is not that I do not wish to post my response publicly, more that I want to give the matter careful thought first as I am sure my first thoughts will be very similar to those of others especially regarding public information, education and opportunities to buy food economically in small enough quantities.

I have also been consulting with younger family members. Whilst it is easy to hark back to what was done fifty years ago we have to accept that things have changed, more people are working and running a home, expectations of variety of food have changed and above all, preaching has a tendency to switch people off rather than encourage change.

[Deleted User]

I think that if you want to implement change in any area of life you have to lead from the front, you can't issue advice and directives and expect anyone to act on it. The only way to set change in motion is to live that change yourself, be open about what and why you are doing what you do, be prepared to give people time and the benefit of your experience rather than advice and to be generous with your practical help if it's needed. The world may not always understand your motivations but are usually very interested in the end result of your labours.

We decided a few years ago to use up our windfall apples to make a batch of cider after reading an article in Home Farmer magazine. We were surprised at how successful it was and shared the cider with some of our friends. The next year we were offered everyone elses windfall apples to process, so we did and made a much bigger batch of cider which we bottled and shared. Over the years we've acquired the equipment we need to make processing and pressing the apples easier, a couple of friends who have fruit trees have borrowed He Who Knows and the equipment for the odd day and made cider and perry. This year we've had a U3A set up in the village, guess who offered cider making as a possible occupation and we've had quite a lot of interest and some folks have committed to being part of it. It means that fruit which would have been tossed onto the compost heap is used and makes a very nice contribution to our lives. Folks are more likely to jump on board any campaign if they can see visible proof of something to their advantage, words and advice don't have anything like the impact of a glass of homemade cider or a jar of homemade jam do they?

Grumpmum

Hi everyone,

Hope it's okay if I join in.
I agree with lots of the points raised above, but I think that educating school aged children, right from the start of primary school, about cooking, budgeting and food safety is vital. We have lost touch with where our food comes from, what is seasonal and what to do with it. Many people do not learn this at home anymore. I think the lack of engagement with the food origins means a lack of respect for the produce, so it's more easily wasted. Perhaps teaching growing food too. My personal opinion is that education, along with tackling supermarket sourcing methods and waste is the way to go.

This can all be very educational too, involving maths, literacy, science.....