What can be done to reduce food waste?

missbiggles1

JackieO wrote: »

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

I often make my own stock from bones but you still have the bones left when you've made it!

moneyistooshorttomention

Thrift wrote: »

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 hadn't clicked to that bit being there in the first post on this thread - ie about responding directly.:o

That is certainly useful to people who read the Old Style sub-forum - but either won't (or can't) post on it for whatever reason.

Good thinking Government researcher:T. (Has just come to conclusion they might well be someone that has been reading this sub-forum generally for a while now - and hence realised the advisability of giving an external "avenue" to respond in).

Money_saving_maniac

I think the government should keep its beak out of peripheral subjects. I do not pay large amounts of tax to keep civil servants in jobs discussing how to reduce food waste. The most efficient way of reducing food waste was the pigswill bucket, which was removed by the government, hand in hand with the EU. Not only that but prior to its banning in 2001 the regular and habitual use of food scraps for pig swill had been drastically reduced, partly as it was not promoted by government.
Producing soy beans to feed to pigs is terrible management. 8million tons of grain goes to feed pigs.
An enormous amount of food could be put to good use by reintroducing pigswill, and now we have brexit it is possible to do this.

Instead of allowing farmers/waste producers to manage their own pigswill disease control, there could be central facilities constructed instead of anerobic digestion plants and landfill/incinceration sites (loads of food actually goes to landfill despite being seperated out by the council tax payer) where the food is heated to the correct temp.

Or indeed a a medical professional could be required to see over private pigswill production facilities, in the same way that a vet is present in abbatoirs to ensure that the animals are fit to eat. These steps would avoid foot and mouth outbreaks but allow the use of pigswill.

Money_saving_maniac

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...

You are wrong. The supermarkets would love it! They make a better profit margin selling you one red pepper at 45p than 3 mixed in a pack for 99p. Same with meat. Their revenue may drop a bit, but that is more than made up for with an increased profit margin. Ask yourself, when BOGOFFS are removed, do prices drop? Rhetorical question, the answer is NO.

Where it could have an impact on consumers is that if revenue drops for a chain store, they will close the ones that make less profit to reduce costs. That would impact on people without transport.

[Deleted User]

The figure bandied around is 25% of the food supply going to waste, so if a population of 66 million are eating 75% of the food, it would take another 22 million people to eat the surplus that's currently being wasted. Conversely, if the existing population were to attempt to eat the surplus everyone would gain 5 stone a year in weight.

Clearly the idea that we can avoid waste by eating the surplus is nonsense because it's totally impossible, so the only way to prevent the waste is to stop producing the surplus food in the first place. Once the surplus has been produced the writing is on the wall because the waste has already become inevitable, and it's pretty irrelevant at what stage down the chain it eventually gets thrown away.

Making biofuel from food waste is not any answer because the owner of the food has to be willing to write off the cost at the time it's thrown away. Food fit for human consumption costs nine times the price of biofuel, so it's only economically viable as a means of mitigating the losses from food that's already gone to waste, not a reason for producing a surplus we can't eat.

thriftwizard

You are wrong. The supermarkets would love it! They make a better profit margin selling you one red pepper at 45p than 3 mixed in a pack for 99p. Same with meat. Their revenue may drop a bit, but that is more than made up for with an increased profit margin. Ask yourself, when BOGOFFS are removed, do prices drop? Rhetorical question, the answer is NO.

What they wouldn't love so much is people realising that perhaps they didn't actually need a red pepper in the first place, or that they could grow it on their own windowsill... What I'm trying to suggest is inculcating an attitude of "enough's enough" but our whole economic system currently relies on people forgetting that!

PasturesNew

Soworried wrote: »

I do need to find an alternative to dog poo bags as I currently buy the cheapest and they are not sustainable.

Get yourself a seaside kids' bucket and spade set ... scoop it into the bucket, then keep a pile of it at home and use one bag for many poos at your leisure

And/or, garden size depending, dig yourself dog poo pits to fill.

[Deleted User]

Originally Posted by Soworried View Post
<<I do need to find an alternative to dog poo bags as I currently buy the cheapest and they are not sustainable.>>

Depending where you live ,our local council give out doggy bags at the local library and council offices for dog owners, we can also get free recycling bags there as well. Well done Medway Council for this service.

JackieO

LameWolf

PasturesNew wrote: »

Get yourself a seaside kids' bucket and spade set ... scoop it into the bucket, then keep a pile of it at home and use one bag for many poos at your leisure

And/or, garden size depending, dig yourself dog poo pits to fill.

And invest in a large clothes peg for your nose, cos it don't half honk when it's been there for a day or so!:eek:

GreyQueen

Being a fairly cynical person, I have long been suspicious that the removal of practical cookery and its replacement with nonsense like food technology is designed to deliver de-skilled consumers into the grasp of big business. Why else would something so demonstrably idiotic have ever been proposed?

In a ideal world, these skills would be learned in the parental home. In the real world, some people have parents who are missing vital life-skills themselves. Or who are too busy about vitally-important matters such as telly-watching, face-booking and various other forms of self-indulgence.

I don't buy this line that everyone is so busy now, everyone works, you can't expect people to cook like it's the 1950s etc etc etc.

My childhood was in the sixties and seventies with a working mum and dad. No meal, other than a sunday roast, was attempted if the prep time was more than 15 mins or the cooking time more than 30. We managed to eat a trad meat-and-two-veg meal each day with a piece of fresh fruit for dessert without stressing about it.

I'm sure my mother would have rather have sat down with a coffee and a book after an 8 hour back-breaking shift in a factory, but she was a responsible citizen. Hell, if the mood struck, there might even be cake-baking done once in a blue moon.

Modern people are spared the huge time and energy-suck which was the washday prior to the automatic washing machine. Therefore, each week has much more time and energy to be spread about for the other domestic arts, such as basic cookery.

If you can cook, you can prepare food efficiently and minimise waste.