It’s not just National Zero Waste Week!

Filed in Blog by on September 4, 2010 5 Comments
FavoriteLoadingAdd article to favourites
Soil Association Organic Fortnight

Soil Association Organic Fortnight

What great timing! While we’re celebrating National Zero Waste Week and are encouraging you lovely people to reduce your food waste, the Soil Association are running their Organic Fortnight.

This year, the Soil Association are encouraging participants to try something new every day. This might be the perfect excuse to visit a local organic farm shop and see what goodies you can pick up (sans packaging of course 😉 ). For the more adventurous, the Soil Association’s Organic Farm School, is a series of hands-on courses in growing your own food, rearing animals, cooking and rural crafts. You could learn bee-keeping, chicken keeping or vegetable growing from experts.

Many people are concerned about the cost of organic food, but there are heaps of ways to eat well on a budget.

From signing up for a vegetable delivery scheme to setting up a buying co-operative and from cooking from scratch to growing your own, you can combine great food, minimum waste and stick to your budget. Maisie’s tip of padding out minced meat with oats and lentils has always stuck in my mind for making your budget stretch. We want you to share your cost saving tips with us, so we can all enjoy more organic food without breaking the bank.

Naturally the number one way to make your budget go further is not to waste food in the first place and that’s where National Zero Waste Week and Organic Fortnight go hand in hand. We want you to reduce your food waste, which, according to WRAP could save the average family £50 a month. The Soil Association want us to value good food and stop viewing it as a disposable commodity. Put them together and you have the perfect solution!

Do you have plans for Organic Fortnight?

Don’t forget – there are prizes to be won during national Zero Waste Week. Sign up on our zero waste week page, pledge to reduce your food waste then come back during the week and tell us how you are getting on. One winner will get a £50 voucher from LUSH and another will get a £50 from Natural Collection.

About the Author ()

I am a long time supporter of the Green and Sustainable lifestyle. After being caught in the Boscastle floods in 2004, our family begun a journey to respect and promote the importance of Earth's fragile ecosystem, that focussed on reducing waste. Inspired by the beauty and resourcefulness of this wonderful planet, I have published numerous magazine articles on green issues and the author of four books.

Comments (5)

Trackback URL | Comments RSS Feed

  1. Karin says:

    If we bought more organic food would we value it more than the stuff we buy because of b-o-g o-f offers that seems so cheap and half (or maybe a third) of which we didn’t really want anyway? If food costs more will we be more careful to use it and not have to throw it away? I think it has had that effect on me.

    The price of cheap food is etched deep in the environment and costs us more than we realise. If supermarkets want to encourage over-production, let them, but we do not need to be complicit. If enough of us vote with our purses to buy quality food raised in a way that is humane and does least damage to the environment the supermarkets will get the message and pass it on to the growers.

    I was amazed to find out when watching ‘Great British Waste Menu’ that supermarkets will reject whole fields of crops, which then have to be ploughed back in or harvested and dumped. Supermarkets have to be told in no uncertain terms that this is unacceptable and we have to accept slightly less than perfect food.

    Do the WRAP statistics include this kind of waste in the 8.3 million tons of food we throw away, do you know, Rae?

  2. Mrs Green says:

    @Karin: I couldn’t agree more, Karin and I hope to find the space to explore this issue more fully during the two weeks. I found the fields of lettuces being ploughed back into the ground a devastating thing to watch. As far as I know Karin, the 8.3 million tonnes is from households, but I will double check that figure for you.

  3. Karin says:

    Thanks, Rae. I would be interested to know. I’ve found an article in the New York Times that says, ‘Americans waste about a third (27%) of the food available for consumption, but this isn’t just the food they take home, the waste starts in supermarkets and restaurants.’ If this is the same in the UK we aren’t actually throwing away a third of the food we buy from the shops, but if the 8.3 million tonnes refers to waste only from households, quite a lot more is being thrown away otherwise, which is even more appalling.

  4. Karin says:

    Sorry, I what I’d written, the NYT actually said,

    ‘Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American.’

  5. Mrs Green says:

    @Karin: Hi Karin, I had this response from WRAP; not good news I’m afraid:

    “The 8.3 million is just from households! We will be publishing some new research in the next couple of months that details the amount of waste appearing before it enters the commercial supply chain.
    Hope this helps – we’ll let you know when that research is available.”

Leave a Reply