The MSE Food Waste Challenge Thread

moneyistooshorttomention

...and then there's the "can't waste any of this food from the garden" and packets of strawberries, rhubarb and apples crammed into every available space:rotfl:

Primrose

We should be grateful for all this food really. I was thinking back yesterday, Remembrance Sunday about wartime when I was a very small child and the nightmare stories my mum told me about food shortages and having to queue for hours, only to find things had run out by the time you got to the counter. I suppose in those days you were grateful for whatever food you get hold of, especially as virtually all of it was either on ration, or available in season only with no domestic freezers for storing any lucky opportunity foods you were able to get hold of.

prosaver

Primrose wrote: »

We should be grateful for all this food really. I was thinking back yesterday, Remembrance Sunday about wartime when I was a very small child and the nightmare stories my mum told me about food shortages and having to queue for hours, only to find things had run out by the time you got to the counter. I suppose in those days you were grateful for whatever food you get hold of, especially as virtually all of it was either on ration, or totally season with no domestic freezers for storing any lucky opportunity foods you were able to get hold of.

i thought rations was only during the war, until someone told me then i looked it up.

Throughout the Second World War, food was rationed in Britain, and this did not end with the war. Although more foods were coming into the country, there were still shortages and rationing did not completely finish until 1954.

- Tea was still on ration until 1952
- 1953 saw the end of sugar and egg rationing
- In 1954 cheese and meats finally came off ration

ref: http://www.mylearning.org/food-in-the-1950s/p-1676/

PasturesNew

Rations and the War will have been different experiences for different people.

My father was in a space occupied by Germans and the British Govt decided to "starve out the Germans". Thing is, on the ground the Germans got all the food, which meant the locals were starving. He came out of the War with malnutrition.

On the other hand, I don't recall mum mentioning the War/food at all - and, having done family history, I think I can see why. She was brought up 1 mile from a big town, with a river. There was an orchard at the end of the road (I know she scrumped in there). Her grandfather (who she lived with) was certainly a poacher and would shoot/eat anything that flew, caught on anybody's land; there are court records.... he was also in prison in the early 1900s for stealing chickens. So a family with guns and hunting know how.

Her extended family were mostly close by and had a long history in the village for being the starters of the Local Allotment Society in the late 1800s and mostly still kept most of the allotments in the area. I know mum's family also kept a pig on one allotment spot. The land was good, their allotment skills meant they knew how to source/swap/grow anything - and the river was 100 yards away for fishing. Added to that one uncle who was in court for black market sales of something, I'm sure he kept them well provided for. Another relative half a mile up the road was also prosecuted for misselling quantities in their shop.

Growing up I know gran was very close with the "cattle market people", knowing all the stallholders, which will have been the extended family network of growers/providers of food, so I bet that my mum and all of their family/friends/neighbours/village were all doing very nicely thank you... with all the contacts they needed to get what they wanted when they wanted it.

I doubt, most days, they even uttered the word "hungry" to be honest.

moneyistooshorttomention

Just what I was thinking PasturesNew.

Peoples experiences would have differed a lot.

Mind you - my mother never mentions the food aspect of 2nd World War (probably because her main concern was getting through it alive - as they were heavily bombed).

I've often thought that, if I had been alive/adult age in the 1930s that I would have deliberately moved out to the country a few years before the War started (somewhere around the mid-1930s probably) - precisely in order to be safer and to ensure I had better chance of the sort of decent access to food you mention safely in time before that war started.

THIRZAH

My father always said that his family was so poor before the war that when rationing started he didn't notice any difference in his diet. His father had a smallholding and bred rabbits for meat. they also had a goat for milk.

My mother's family were a bit better off. They lived in the same village as my father. Her father was a pig farmer and was allowed to have a certain number of pigs a year killed. They made some meat into bacon and gave some to neighbours who would then give them meat back when it was their turn to kill a pig. They grew all their own fruit and veg and my great-grandparents had cows.Nearly everyone had chickens. My grandmother made them all give up sugar in their tea so there was sugar for jam making and bottling fruit.

My grandmother was a skilled seamstress. My father's sister once told me that they were all jealous of my mother as she had such nice clothes but my mother said most of them were made from cut-down clothes of my grandmother or great-grandmother.

LameWolf

Primrose wrote: »

I find one has to be fairly ruthless about keeping a freezer inventory and menu planning to keep all this under control. And then you have days where for some reason your schedule involves a change in routine and eating needs and the whole lot goes to pot!

I set up my meal plan keeping in mind the option to swap days around. We don't so much get unexpected events/changes of plan, but we do get days when I'm too unwell to do much, so if a fairly labour intensive meal is on the list on one of those days, I simply swap it with another day in the week when something easy is listed.
It works for us.

moneyistooshorttomention

Quick query for the day - as finances have started to ease a bit my diet is getting better and I'm not eating so much bread.

I usually make my own bread - 2 full-size loaves of wholemeal bread a time and cut them in half and put the other 3 halves into the freezer to pull out when I run through current half-loaf.

That's not working for me any more - and I'm often finding that a half-loaf is starting to go off on me (ie I spot a bit of mould) before I've finished it. Time for a re-think then - so as not to have to throw out major part of those half-loaves.

As I know it's possible to freeze "rubber bread" (ie sliced white supermarket bread - M*thers Pride and the like) and just take slices out of the freezer and put straight in the toaster to use, then can I assume the same applies to decent bread?

I'm wondering about pre-slicing these loaves of bread when I make them and taking out just a couple of slices a time from the freezer and putting straight in toaster in the same way as people can with "rubber bread". This because my bread is quite a bit denser in texture.

Also wondering what best to use for separating the slices of bread in their freezer bag packets I put them into (eg would kitchen parchment paper do the trick?).

Thoughts?

Primrose

We make our own bread, usually half &half white and wholemeal with a generous proportion of mixed seeds added so it's quite a dense bread and store two in the freezer at a time.
Once we take it out we store in a large polythene bag in the fridge with a peg type clip on it and it will keep for a week without problems. I think pre-slicing and then freezing would not enhance its keeping properties and probably cause it to dry out more quickly. We're not huge bread eaters but this works for us. Would it help to make smaller loaves?

moneyistooshorttomention

That's a thought Primrose - peg type clip/fridge.

I've just got a new cafetiere and it came complete with a measurer spoon with integral "clip" to shut coffeebags - I can feel an experiment with that coming on.