Food Waste Audit Diary May 2019

tighteningthebelt wrote: »

I'm doing a tight audit of food waste for May 2019. I don't waste much, but there's always room for improvement with all these skills. I welcome any advice, or anybody who wants to do it along with me.

There are three categories of waste food; avoidable, unavoidable, and possibly avoidable.
Broadly speaking
'Avoidable' is food that could have been eaten at some point, but that has spoiled due to being left too long, examples might be mouldy bread or liquefied cucumber.
'Unavoidable' is things like banana or pineapple skins, eggshells, used teabags, that were never edible.
'Possibly avoidable' is things like peelings, which some people might eat and other not.

(I did briefly consider whether 'unavoidable' can even be classed as 'waste', the word waste implies carelessness and even extravagance to my mind, but I don't want to get too hung up on that, the figures have to be comparable or else it isn't a challenge at all!!)

Interesting challenge and thought-provoking definitions. Thank you doing this in public. I have been reporting my avoidable food waste on the 'Cooking for One' thread. However that is just my food and drink, not the other member of my household: my little cat.

To me tea bags and coffee grounds are 'possibly avoidable'. Humans do not need to drink anything other than water in a healthy, balanced diet [no I do not practice what I preach ] Additionally many tea bags or coffee grounds could be reused or shared but are not. Even those people who reuse or share at home may not when getting a brew from cafes/ coffee shops/ fast food outlets.

Blackbeard_of_Perranporth wrote: »

One way to reduce waste is only buy what you are going to cook! And it saves money. Our food waste bin is only peel and skins, nothing else. On Saturday we has stir fry fridge bitsers, all the left overs from the week into the pan and served up.

I don't think it is as simple as that, especially for small households. Not every grocery store or supermarket offers a wide range of fruit and veg loose, plus without protective packaging many fresh fruit and vegetables degrade quickly.

For singletons there can be a choice between eating a restricted or monotonous diet with relatively low food waste, or a properly varied diet with relatively high food waste.

Buying smaller amounts of fresh food more frequently can have cost implications too, on transportation and/ or because you are tempted into impulse purchases. In some cases (eg. small 'local'/ urban supermarkets) individual loose produce is as expensive as a bulk bag elsewhere (large supermarkets)!

thriftwizard wrote: »

Hmm - you can use onion skins for making stock, or for dyeing; in my book, using them for something productive means they're not actually wasted. Compost certainly isn't a waste (speak to my runner beans!) and nor is boiling up all our veg peelings & gone-over fruit to feed the chickens. So whilst I'm totally in sympathy with the idea of not wasting food, & rarely do so, I'm not quite on board with the definition of waste as above.

I can see why composted waste is included. As Tighteningthebelt says "the figures have to be comparable". It allows for a comparison between households that do and do not compost (choice), or between households who can and cannot compost (facilities).

Producing avoidable food waste impacts the environment: the land on which it was grown or produced, the packaging for sale and or transport, the 'air miles' or 'road miles' and so on.

Reducing landfill exactly as you do is how I was brought up, yet my food waste and packaging waste is unacceptably high. If I was able to compost that would potentially mask rather than tackling my issue.

My comments are not a covert 'dig' - pardon the pun - at you or any other Old Styler who composts or feeds food waste to their animals. I am quite sure you are doing as much as you can to reduce overbuying and use up leftovers. But many households are not, including mine.