How to do your bit to help beat food waste epidemic
MAJOR producers and supermarkets such as Nestle, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose have pledged to halve food waste by 2030.
Here’s how you can do your bit at home as part of the Step Up To The Plate campaign. 1. Buy what you need If a recipe you’re planning on making only requires one red pepper, avoid buying the multipack – even if it works out cheaper – if you know you’re unlikely to eat the rest. 2. Save all your leftover pasta Chuck odds and ends of spaghetti and fusilli in together for a medley that can be thrown in with a sauce or into soup. 3. Grate cheese and freeze Pre-empt mouldy ends of cheese by grating the lot and freezing for a later date, when mac and cheese, lasagne or cheese on toast is needed. In fact, most dairy freezes brilliantly – especially milk and hard cheese. 4. Pickle and preserve Got a glut of tomatoes, cucumber, cabbage etc.?
Pickling veggies or making chutneys is a great way to use them up, and store them for later use. 5. Eat the skins Opt for skin-on chips, roast carrots and parsnips with the skins on, and even beetroot skin is more than edible – it’ll save you time not having to peel them too. 6. Keep an eye on use-by dates BY ELLA WALKER Whether in the fridge, or if you’re bulk shopping, freeze things immediately if you know you’re not going to get round to eating them in time to beat their use by date. 7. Use your nose The best-before date is a guideline, use your nose – if something smells OK and looks OK to eat, it probably is.
Use-by dates, though, ought to be followed. 8. Buy the ugly fruit and veg The wonky veg is most often the kind that ends up in landfill – rescue it because it will taste just as good as the aesthetically beautiful stuff. 9. Plan meals ahead and think about how you could reuse leftovers If you have a meal plan for the week, it will cut down on your fridge filling with random bits of food without a job to do. Also, if you know what you’ve got in, you’ll be able to work out what to do with leftovers too. 10. Keep your fridge tidy If you can see what you’ve got, use-by dates will be easier to access and you’ll avoid ending up with a salad drawer of green, decaying mush. 11. Make soups, stocks and smoothies All three can use up tons of leftover veggies and fruit on the turn, plus they freeze really well. 12. Compost If all else fails, everything except meat, fish and dairy can go straight in the compost, so any nutrients can return to the soil.
Go for skinon chips, roast carrots and parsnips I feel fed up for no real reason – is this normal?
Everyone has the occasional off day, where nothing seems to cheer you up, but if this feeling persists it is a warning sign that you may have an underlying mental health problem.
Four out of every five suicides are by men and it’s the biggest cause of death in men under 35.
“Men are much less likely than women to seek help for mental health problems, whether it’s from a health professional or another family member,” said Martin Tod.
The Mental Health Foundation recommends chatting to a friend, finding someone who will listen to your problems (rather than try to fix them), taking exercise or even asking someone else how they are – helping others can have a big impact on your own mood. Everyone has the odd night where they need to get up for the loo, but if a man finds it’s happening regularly it could be due to an enlarged prostate gland. Don’t automatically assume this means cancer – benign prostate enlargement is common in men over 50, affecting over two million men in the UK, but isn’t usually a serious threat to health.
However, left untreated with drugs or surgery it can cause kidney damage or bladder stones and can seriously affect your quality of life.
Problems urinating arise because the swollen prostate can press on the bladder, increasing the urge to pee, or block the urethra (the tube which carries urine out of the body), making it harder to empty the bladder properly.
If you are worried about prostate cancer, however, talk to your GP about having a blood test.