The Daily Telegraph - Features
Noel in Battersea is giving away eight eggs, Mila has half a bag of spinach
As the cost of living crisis hits, for five days Lucy Denyer tried feeding her family with salvaged waste food
Energy bills are up, real wages are declining and – oh my goodness – the grocery bills. Grocery price inflation last month jumped to 11.6 per cent (the highest rate since 2008), annual food shopping bills are set to rise by £533 this year and the ONS now reports 40 per cent of parents of young children have cut back on food and essentials. I have three boys and a hungry husband, and my average shop has never come out at less than £80 a week. That once got me a decent haul, now it equates to about three paltry bags-worth of food, even at Lidl or Aldi – and I’m a thrifty shopper.
So I set myself a challenge. For one week (OK, five days) I’d feed my family using only waste food. There’s a lot of it about. According to the campaigning organisation Wrap, we throw away 6.6 million tonnes of household waste food each year in the UK, nearly three quarters of which could be eaten. Well, in my household I decided what others may choose to chuck, we’d make a meal out of it.
I download Olio, a food-sharing app that was set up in 2015 with the simple premise of connecting people who have unwanted food with people who want it (you can give away non-food items too). It’s free, but I pay an additional £1.99 (a monthly fee) to allow me to search specific areas, and get alerts as to what is available.
I have high hopes – a friend once got 70 Nespresso coffee capsules from Olio for free – but, as backup, I sign up for TooGoodToGo, which connects consumers to restaurants, cafes and bakeries with surplus food that would otherwise be thrown away and sells it in the form of a “magic bag” of surprise goodies.
My first Olio foray does not fill me with hope, however. The only potential meal is some leftover KFC chicken, the photo of which shows it nestled forlornly in what looks like a bin. It has been on the app for 11 hours already. The closest listing to my house, meanwhile, is a sad-looking photo of two chillies.
Still, it’s Friday. Come Monday, surely things will be better?
MONDAY
The week does not start well. I had forgotten, on Sunday evening, about my impending challenge, and so failed to prep. Olio is still only offering the chillies. My boys eat cereal and the dregs of the milk for breakfast, while I allow myself a temporary new option – reduced-price food. A whizz around Waitrose produces a bag of yellow-stickered kale, cauliflower and quinoa and a packet of iced finger buns for a quid – bargain.
Lunch is dregs again. Spaghetti for the boys, with leftover red pesto. For me, the quinoa mix, with some feta crumbled through, half a dried-up lemon squeezed on top, some herbs from the garden and the last few olives in a jar.
Swiping through Olio in desperation in the afternoon I chance on gold – someone nearby is giving away 2kg of potatoes.
I hop on my bike and arrive at a smart apartment block just down the river, to be greeted suspiciously at the door by a woman who looks at me as if I am about to rob her of her last belongings.
She hands me the bag of potatoes, then chains the door in my face. Never mind. For supper we eat like kings, on soup made from half of the potatoes, a couple
Swiping through Olio in desperation I chance on gold – someone is giving away 2kg of potatoes
of bunches of sad-looking spring onions from the vegetable drawer, a stock cube and the remains of a tub of cream, along with a heel of bread with the last bit of butter from the dish.
Buoyed by this good fortune, I decide to splash out on a couple of magic bags to tide us through the next day. One is from a bakery in Fulham which, for £3.49, nets us a whole brioche, a couple of almond croissants, a cinnamon roll, a pistachio-strewn Danish, plus a chicken baguette.
The other is a “grocery bag” from the nearby petrol-station Budgens for £4. It turns out to contain some peri-peri chicken wings (reduced), two snack pots of fruit, a pasty, a stale croissant and a Rustlers burger. Disappointing.
TUESDAY
With all the pastries, breakfast is like being in a Parisian hotel. I leave for work before the boys wake up, taking the remains of the soup and the cinnamon bun for lunch. Yum.
The cinnamon bun doesn’t last longer than 9.30am.
Arriving at work and checking Olio, I am torn. Julie up the road in Pimlico is giving away mountains of bread – almond croissants, croissants, cheese sticks, pretzels, pain au chocolat and bread. I am tempted, but ultimately, too lazy.
The boys eat peri-peri chicken, roast potatoes and a tin of sweetcorn for lunch. Before leaving work I check Olio again, and discover that Noel in Battersea is giving away eight eggs, and a bit further up the road, Mila has a smorgasbord of goods available – bread, half a bag of spinach, some butter, cheese, tortellini, Brussels sprouts and corn on the cob.
Dinner is a triumph – cheese soufflé with Noel’s eggs and Mila’s cheese, along with a salad made up of the sprouts, thinly sliced, and some leftover fennel. Sadly, two of the boys reject it and opt for leftover chicken wings and the pasty. “I only like the dough part,” declares the six-year-old of the latter, picking the pastry off what looks like a dead rat.
At 10pm I hop on my bike to collect a packet of crumpets and some reduced-price muffins from Marina up the road. She has helpfully left them labelled in a cool box outside her house. I may be eating a lot of bread, but at least I’m cycling a lot more than usual.
WEDNESDAY
I start strong, making French toast using the leftover brioche and one of Noel’s eggs. Lunch is seriously slim pickings – some leftover salad and the very last of the chicken wings (the gift that keeps on giving) for the boys.
In the afternoon the photographer is coming to document my free food triumph and I am scouring Olio frantically
– there is literally nothing on there, bar the two bloody chillies. I cycle sweatily back to Fulham to grab another magic bag and decide to just wing it with what’s in the fridge.
In the end we enjoy a sort of buffet-style tea, of varying degrees of gastronomy. I sautée the last of Monday’s potatoes, and add one of Noel’s eggs, poached. The youngest has a Parma ham croissant from a coffee shop. The eldest has what looks like a very gourmet pasta dish consisting of tortellini with scrapings from the rest of the red pesto jar. Mila’s bag had only eight tortellini left in the packet, so that’s all he gets.
The middle one, meanwhile, opts for the Rustlers burger. He only gets halfway through before promising to finish the rest “later”.
THURSDAY
By Thursday we’re running out of milk but I also have Olio fatigue. I do not have it in me to cycle to a random nearby house for half a bag of cavolo nero. I decide we can eat what’s left in the fridge.
My husband and I have to go to a family funeral in the afternoon, and he is snackish when we arrive. I decide to temporarily pause my quest and pop into Tesco: two hard-boiled eggs, a tube of Pringles and some grapes (no judgment, please). Being able to decide what to eat is a joy. But also, it costs £6. You could get two magic bags for that.
FRIDAY
The last day! A stale croissant for breakfast and leftovers for lunch have never tasted so good. In the evening we’re going on a date to watch an open-air film and by the time I get there, half a leftover beetroot salad from a colleague in hand, my husband has already ordered pizza. Oh well.
My conclusion? It is possible to eat relatively well on waste food – but only if you’re very organised, prepared to do quite a bit of running around and, crucially, can cook. My total food bill for those five days comes out at £19.48, which includes my £1.99 Olio subscription and £6 in Tesco (although not the Friday pizza).
But I spend the entire week worrying about where the next meal will be coming from, and an inordinate amount of time on my bicycle. Also, I live in a city where there is plenty of food on offer. I doubt that my parents, who live in a small Yorkshire village, would be able to scrounge as much.
That said, as winter draws in and money gets tighter I wouldn’t dismiss doing it again.
My only proviso? Stay away from the Budgens bags.