101 YEARS OLD AND STILL READY TO SHARE HIS FRIDGE...

ONE evening last week I popped into Omved Gardens in Highgate, north London for three reasons. The first was the place itself which is an imaginative blend of garden, greenhouse, kitchen and all-purpose venue; the second was the launch of a new charity which intrigued me and the third was that they had invited me to dinner. The last, I confess, was the deciding factor in my attendance but as it turned out, the least important.

The charitable endeavour is called Recipe For Disaster and is strongly linked to promoting a vital message from the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) concerning food wastage. The fact is that we produce enough food to feed everyone on Earth yet every day one in nine people go to bed hungry while one third of the food in affluent nations is wasted.

The ambitious target of the WFP is Zero Hunger by 2030 but to achieve it requires a massive change of attitude and awareness. The idea of Recipe For Disaster is both to spread awareness of the WFP’s work and to encourage donations generated by a more sensible use of resources. There is a simple four-point plan: 1: Look in your fridge for stuff that is near its use-by date. 2: Use it to create a meal. 3: Share it with pictures or a video with the hashtag #RecipeForDisaster.

4: Work out how much money you’ve saved and make a donation to WFP.

Unlike many charities which rely solely on generosity or middle-class guilt, this seemed to be an excellent idea and the food they provided, all made from items about to be wasted, was mostly excellent.

Save, create, share, persuade others to do the same seemed to me to be a fine message as well as a brilliant incentive to seeing what was lurking in my fridge. So the next day, I opened the fridge door for an inspection.

As you may know, I arrange my fridge roughly according to Danté’s description of Hell. My first circle is stuff I have just bought; the second circle comprises items still within their best-by period but then we move through “past best-by date but still probably OK”, “well past best-by date but not mouldy enough to throw away”, “good in parts if we scrape the mould off,” and the circles become murkier and murkier until we reach the stuff skulking at the back that has been there so long it is impossible to tell what it was in the first place.

My standard use for circle 3 (and possibly parts of circles 4 and even 5) has been to make what I call “fridge soup” by boiling everything together then liquidising. It’s always delicious and always different.

But from now on I shall be more ambitious and imaginative, and my best creations may even tempt me to venture into the realms of social media by photographing and sharing them through #RecipeForDisaster if I can work out hashtags.

I thoroughly recommend you have a go at doing the same or take a look at cdn.wfp.org/2018/recipe-for-disaster.

It’s a rare chance for fun in the kitchen and supporting a worthy cause.