Tips and tricks to minimise weekly family food waste
How can I throw away less food? What a brilliant question, and frankly one I don’t think we ask ourselves enough as we fill our trolley. UK households throw away approximately 4.5 million tonnes of food every year. Food waste costs around £60 per month for the average family with children.
In a cost-of-living crisis I think we’d all rather that £60 be spent somewhere it’s needed rather than going in the bin.
One million loaves of bread are thrown away annually, that’s alongside almost 4.5 million potatoes and 800,000 apples – and those are crops we mostly grow in the UK.
We don’t grow bananas in the UK so their food miles and climate impact are already fairly sizeable.
When you consider the fact we throw away 920,000 of them alongside 720,000 oranges and 86,000 lettuces, it’s time we all did our bit and tried our very best to bin as little as possible.
Firstly, freeze things – stew your nearly done apples and freeze that for a crumble, freeze banana slices for smoothies and bread freezes perfectly well.
Next consider how you shop, if you find you’re constantly throwing away food you didn’t get to use when it was fresh, ask yourself about your shopping habits.
The ‘big shop’ suits lots of families but maybe you could get less items a bit more frequently so you’re not risking food going off before you can use it.
Next, go wonky. We’ve all seen food prices rising massively in the last 12 months and those prices could continue to rise as climate change and global droughts are reducing yield and quality. A lot of supermarkets have wonky veg sections where the veg is far cheaper and just a bit more imaginatively shaped.
You can make your money go further in these aisles and get items to batch cook, no one’s going to know the shape of a wonky pepper or tomato when they’re all blitzed up into a pasta sauce which you can portion and freeze.
Make a list before you go shopping too, we’re all lured by offers and reduced price items we might not normally buy but if you go with a list you’ll find you’re only getting the items you’ve got meals planned for so they shouldn’t go to waste. Which brings us nicely onto meal planning. How many times do we open the fridge, have no idea what to do so reach for the take away menu? Planning meals takes the fuss out of prep as well as massively reducing waste.
Don’t be afraid to get imaginative with leftovers too. Left over veggies and spuds from Sunday roasts make a fab bubble and squeak with a fried egg on a Monday, and they tick the ‘meat free Monday’ box too.
While aiming for zero food waste is a good idea, if you find yourself responsible for some of the 2.2 million slices of ham wasted annually in the UK or
1.2 million of the tomatoes that end up in the bin, making these small steps will help reduce what you bin and help your wallet too.
Angela Terry
from fiction and explains how you
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