TV chef ’s war on the stores that demand the perfect parsnip
FROM campaigning against battery farms to crusading for sustainable fishing, chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has taken on his fair share of good causes.
Now the television cook is using a TV documentary to go to war on food waste, highlighting the plight of the parsnip.
In the show, he points out that hundreds of thousands of tons of edible vegetables are left to rot, as they do not meet exacting supermarket standards. As many as one in four root vegetables – including parsnips, carrots and potatoes – are being rejected.
A mother and son who run a parsnip farm in Norfolk told the chef that they are forced to dump 30 to 40 per cent of their crop each week as the vegetables would not be acceptable to their buyer, supermarket Morrisons.
This amounts to 20 tons of parsnips a week, which are either fed to animals or ploughed back into the soil. Fearnley-Whittingstall said this was ‘one of the most shocking things I’ve ever seen’.
Debbie Hammond, whose family has grown parsnips at Tattersett Farm since the 1970s, wept as she said the huge waste of produce meant they were operating at a loss.
Her son Olly Hammond added: ‘If we sent in these parsnips they would be rejected and returned the next day.’ Around 15million tons of food and drink were thrown away in the UK in 2013. Nearly half of this waste occurred in the home, and most of it could have been avoided.
Fearnley-Whittingstall said: ‘We’re talking about a colossal amount of good food. We have to do the right thing with that surplus, and leaving it to rot is clearly the wrong thing. If supermarkets were a little bit more relaxed and it was left to the eye of the producer and common sense, we’d see a lot more perfectly good produce.’
The chef is now urging shoppers and super- markets to buy imperfect vegetables to cut the £12.5billion worth of produce wasted each year. Fearnley-Whittingstall’s campaign has been timed to tie in with his BBC1 show Hugh’s War on Waste as well as his latest cookbook, Love your Leftovers.
Yesterday Allison Ogden-Newton, from charity Keep Britain Tidy, said: ‘Hugh is highlighting the shocking extent to which food is wasted and is demanding people think about what they can do to waste less.
‘We think that is important and want to add that, once waste has been created, it is vital people do the right thing by making sure it does not end up in landfill.’
A Morrisons spokesman said it had tried selling bags of less perfect ‘Class II’ parsnips but customers ‘weren’t buying them in sufficient numbers’. The supermarket said at the weekend that it will donate wasted food to the needy instead of throwing it away.
‘Leaving it to rot is clearly wrong’