Food & recipes

7 Steps to Reduce Food Waste

There’s a global food waste crisis – here’s how to do your bit to help

Throwing out unused food items from the fridge at the end of the week might not seem like a big deal but consider this: food waste in the home is worth £700 per year to the average UK family, over one third of all food produced globally goes to waste and, in particularly upsetting news, the almost one billion people in the world who go hungry every day could be fed on less than a quarter of the food that’s wasted in America, the UK and Europe.

So why is so much of our produce ending up in the bin? “We have become accustomed to buying spontaneously without judicious planning to ensure that we eat all that we buy,” says Rosalind Rathouse, who runs classes in how to avoid food waste at The Cookery School at Little Portland Street (cookeryschool.co.uk) “Buying packs in the supermarket rather than buying as many apples, or whatever else, as we want is quicker and easier than picking and weighing just the number of apples that we need, as one would have done before the advent of supermarkets.

“Buying highly convenient foods like bagged salads and prepared veg means that their shelf life is not as long as if you bought unwashed and unprepared salad and vegetables. We are also accustomed to buying ‘perfect’ veg and fruit – malformed food is thrown away before it even leaves the supermarket. This practice is changing and if we start asking for and using more malformed fruit and vegetables, waste at shop level could be reduced.

“In earlier days where waste was not a way of life, people planned judiciously so that they bought what they needed to eat and used up every last crumb in dishes. We, of the fast food era, have abandoned this practice.”

Here are seven ways you can help to reduce the amount of food you waste:

1. Buy local

Piling veg into your trolley in Tesco and expecting it to last is a risky business. Supermarkets import their produce from locations all over the globe – your asparagus from Peru could have been picked weeks ago and you’re likely to find it limp once you go to use it. But sourcing your food locally from farm shops and greengrocers means it could have been picked as little as yesterday, giving it potentially weeks of staying power over its supermarket-bought counterpart.

2. Plan your meals

Sounds boring, but it will save so much wasted food. If you do your shopping in a rush after work, starving and mindlessly throwing whatever you fancy into the trolley, even with the most creative cooking in the world you’re unlikely to be able to use everything before it expires. You don’t have to plan a whole week’s worth of meals out in one go – just two or three and shop for these.

And freeze any leftovers – rather than shove what’s left at dinner time into the fridge and forget about it for a week, invest in some lovely glass storage containers and portion up food as soon as you’ve finished dinner. Place in the freezer for an instant home-cooked ready meal, without all the usual processed nasties you get in shop-bought buys.

3. Store food correctly

Some fruits and vegetables release a gas called ethene as they ripen, which triggers other produce to ripen quicker too. Ripe bananas can cause your whole fruit bowl to turn brown in the blink of an eye. Keep them well away from other fruit. Apples are similar, so store them in the fridge and away from other fresh produce. You could also try including a device in your fridge designed to increase the lifespan of fruit and vegetables such as the BerryBreeze Activated Oxygen Refrigerator Deodorizer, £37.35, amazon.co.uk

4. Ignore sell-by dates

The food standards agency say they are an indication of quality; something passed its best before date will still be safe to eat after the date shown but may not still have its optimum flavour or texture. Cynics say it’s a ploy by food manufacturers to make shops and consumers throw items out after a certain date and buy more in, but, either way, ignore this date. The only date you need to pay attention to is the use-by, as this is calculated for food safety on perishable items and indicates the date at which bacteria may have grown beyond a safe level within the product.

5. Use apps

A firm favourite here at NH HQ is Olio, which connects you with people in your community who have spare food they want to share rather than throw away. Have a bag of carrots you’re not going to be able to use before they go off? Simply take a snap and upload it, and wait for the rush of messages offering them a new home.

Farmdrop connects consumers with local farmers, allowing you to buy direct and local in a very sustainable fashion.

If you live in London, try the Karma app, which helps you discover unsold food from nearby establishments.

6. Keep a diary

In the same way as keeping a food diary can be a real eye opener to what you are actually consuming versus what you think you are consuming, so too can a record of everything you toss into the bin. Keep a pen and note pad by the rubbish and record everything that is disposed of. See what it amounts to over the course of a week and then a month. If nothing else, this serves as a motivator to do better!

7. Get creative in the kitchen

Sometimes, no matter how carefully you’ve planned, there are items in the fridge that you are at a loss as to what to do with. Luckily, there are plenty of resources online to help you out. Stuck for recipe ideas? Many recipe sites let you search by individual ingredient, like bbcgoodfood.com, so if you’ve got a rogue cauliflower, cabbage or kohlrabi but lack inspiration, you can type in your surplus ingredient and be met with a whole host of fresh new ideas. Another good site is lovefoodhatewaste.com which has loads of helpful ideas for preventing waste and using up excess everyday produce.