Love Food Hate Waste
/Each year, two prominent events draw attention to the critical issue of food waste. The first is Food Waste Action Week, held in early March and organized by Love Food Hate Waste, which emphasizes the magnitude of food waste and explores actionable solutions. The second is Stop Food Waste Day, occurring at the end of April and initiated by Compass Group US, aimed at educating the public and inspiring meaningful change.
Both events serve as valuable reminders to reflect on our personal waste habits. They provide a wealth of information on the food waste crisis and practical strategies for reducing waste at home. Drawing from our experiences, we've compiled our top tips for minimizing food waste at home.
Before we come to what we can do, here’s a few stats about food waste from Love Food Hate Waste:
70% of the food that is wasted (post farm gate) is from our homes. The power is in our hands.
UK households waste 6.5 million tonnes of food every year, 4.5 million of which is edible.
If everyone in the UK stopped throwing away food for just one day, it would do the same for climate change as taking 14,000 cars off the road for a whole year.
Now that we’re feeling motivated to do something about it here are some tips for reducing food waste at home:
1) Buy only what you need. Love Food Hate Waste advise planning your shopping in advance as their number 1 tip however we’re not huge meal planners pre-shopping. We find it doesn’t really work with the way we like buying food. We like to have a cupboard full of long life dried foods (obviously!) and then we’ll get our weekly fresh fruit and veg from our allotment, farmers markets and local farm shops. Shopping this way means we can have a rough idea of what we’ll find given the season but its not always a-given so we’ll plan our meals once we have bought our fresh produce. But our number 1 rule when shopping is to not over buy! (Which obviously is what meal and shop planning helps to avoid!) So whether you’re a planner or not, the first thing to be aware of is how much fresh produce you need for a week (or however often you plan to shop). This may take a bit of trial and error but luckily there’s things you can do if you do over buy!
2) Get great at storage. This has been the one thing we have spent time learning about. In the past we haven’t been very good at this! Dried foods - easy - make sure your jars are dry and airtight but we often fall down with the storage of our fresh food; letting carrots go soft on the counter top, mushrooms in the fridge, you name it, we were storing it all wrong! Our remedy was to invest in a gorgeous print from Eco With Em, a beautiful illustration highlighting how best to store food without plastic, which we’re going to stick on our fridge as a daily reminder! We’ve then got everything sorted ready to use - cloths to wrap leafy greens in, a sack to put our potatoes in to stop them going green, jars of water in the fridge for carrots, and 2 labelled containers in the fridge, one without a lid and one with so the fruit and veg end up in the right environment! Love Food Hate Waste also have a guide for storage too that you can check out.
3) Keep an eye on the back of the fridge! Now that you’ve bought your food and stored it well, a good habit to get into is to do a quick check in the morning to see how your fresh produce is getting on. This way you’ll know when your fresh produce needs eating or its storage switching and stop it from going bad before its had a chance to be used. This way you can switch up your meal plans or throw in an extra ingredient to a recipe and ensure nothing is left at the back of the fridge and ends up wasted.
4) Value your food. When cooking your food look to utilise as much of it as possible. There are now loads of chefs and recipes out there encouraging us to eat our broccoli stalks, carrot tops, use scraps to make stocks, bean water to make meringue and lots more! When preparing your meal keep an eye on your scraps - is there anything of use there? Investigate before getting rid of it. If in doubt pop it in the fridge or freezer until you have time to do your research. Our favourite zero waste chefs for brilliant inspiration are Tom Hunt, Anne-Marie Bonneau, Max La Manna and the Zero Waste Cooking School from Douglas McMaster. And on the flip side, take note of portion sizes for dried foods such as rice and pasta. These are easily over-portioned (definitely in our house!) so take note of correct portion amounts (check out LFHW Portion Planner for guide) or you can:
5) Love your leftovers. You can even plan for leftovers - batch cooking is such a winner! No matter how small, keep hold of leftovers. Small portions can be added to future meals, used as a breakfast, lunch or snack or brought together to create a whole new meal! It took us a ridiculously long time to realise we could make a delicious vegetable fried rice from leftover rice (something we always over portion!). LFHW have a leftover recipe guide you can check out for ideas.
6) Don’t forget stocks, soups and smoothies. These are saviours of food waste. Great to utilise scraps, leftovers and fresh fruit and veg that is on the turn (or even gone past the turn!) and super easy to freeze and store for future meals, which leads us to:
7) Your freezer is your friend! Utilise your freezer to prolong the life of fresh produce. There are lots of fresh fruit and veg you can freeze, either as is or par-boiled or cooked (the Love Food Hate Waste Food Storage webpage is a good reference point if you’re unsure). And of course its also good to store leftovers if you don’t want to eat immediately.
8) Share! If you don’t think you’re going to use your food in time and don’t have the time to make a soup etc you can look to share with a neighbour or friend or use Olio to list food to those in your neighbourhood.
9) Get composting. The final resting place for food waste. Composting is a great final resting place for the food waste that you can’t utilise. Turning food back into food and not wasting it in landfill where it won’t breakdown properly and instead produce methane. There are composting systems available for most household circumstances, from large scale compost systems, mid-sized wormeries to work top sized bokashi bins. If you don’t fancy an at home compost, Cornwall Council are now rolling out food composting which will be up and running by 2025! (If you’d like to read more about composting at home check out our blog post on our wormery adventure!).
We think that covers it and will hopefully help you reduce food wastage in your home. What do you think? Which area do you excel at and which needs a little more work?
Don’t forget to also take a look at our recipes page for some of our favourite tried and tested minimal waste recipes.
