How to reduce food waste
It was reported recently that in the UK, we throw away up to one third of the food we buy each week. This amounts to 6.7 million tonnes of food each year.
As the food crisis increases around the world, it makes sense for us to reduce the amount of food we waste. This will save us money too - imagine saving a third of your weekly food bill!
Food waste is caused by cooking too much and then throwing away the extras, buying 3 for 2 offers and not using things before they go off, impulse buys, poor portion control or mouldy fruit and vegetables.
Many people think that throwing food in the landfill is ok. It’s biodegradable after all, so doesn’t create problems. The trouble is, more often than not, the biodegradable food gets wrapped inside a non biodegradable plastic bag! If the air doesn’t get to the food then it won’t rot down.
In the absence of oxygen, biodegradable materials (such as food, cardboard and green waste) decompose and produce methane gas, which contributes to global warming.
Here are my top ten tips to help you reduce food waste.
1- Menu plan.
Think about the meals that your family enjoys most and make a menu plan for the week. Write down the ingredients you need for each meal on a list. There is nothing worse than pushing a trolley around a supermarket aimlessly with no ideas about your meals for the following week. You often end up with an expensive trolley full of ingredients that don’t go together!
2- Use up your leftovers.
Before you begin your menu plan, take a look at any leftovers in the fridge, vegetable rack and cupboards. Vegetables which are starting to go soft can be made into soup or pasta sauces. Over ripe fruits can be made into pies or blended to make smoothies. Half a tin of tuna could be tonight’s pasta bake and a few spoons of cooked mince could be made into pasties.
3- Write a shopping list.
Write a list from your menu plan and take it with you to the shop. If you stick to the list you’ll be more likely to resist impulse buys that don’t get used up.
4- Don’t shop when you’re hungry.
It’s a simple tip but an important one. If you shop when your stomach is growling, you’ll be tempted to buy all sorts of things you don’t need. Plus if you’re focusing on your hunger, you’re not focusing on making good choices.
5- Rotate foods in your cupboards and fridge.
When you get home from shopping, put all the new food at the BACk of the fridge and cupboards and bring last week’s old items to the front. How many times have you found something mouldy hiding in the back of the ‘fridge?
6- Take a look at what you throw away.
Be honest with yourself and start writing things down. Do you throw away half a loaf of bread a week? Then why not freeze it and take out slices as you need them. Take individual slices out for sandwiches the night before you need them, or use straight from frozen for toasting. If you regularly throw away vegetables then maybe you need to buy them loose and reduce the amount you buy each week.
7- Check your fridge.
Are the seals good and is the temperature set to between 1 and 5 degrees? This ensures your fridge will keep your food fresh for as long as possible.
8- Start a compost heap, a wormery or a bokashi bin.
If you regularly throw out gone off fruit and vegetables then why not turn them into something useful by starting a compost bin. They are easier than you might think to manage and there are a range of styles to suit all garden sizes.
Check out Recycle Now first to see if your council has a special deal on compost bins.
If you have a tiny garden, then you could try a wormery.
If you have no garden at all then why not try a kitchen composter, such as the Bokashi bin? A bokashi bin will even take cooked food scraps. Keep checking back on the site for an exciting competition to win a bokashi bin in the future!
9- Portion control.
It can be difficult, especially with children who eat like a horse one day and hardly anything the next, to serve the right sized portions. Why not let your family help themselves by taking a small portion with the knowledge that they can come back for more when that has been eaten? Any leftovers can be covered and stored in the ‘fridge once they have cooled down and used the following day.
10- Left overs and ingredients.
View today’s leftovers as tomorrow’s ingredients with a bit of creative thinking. A couple of sausages could be made into a pasta bake or toad in the hole, cooked vegetables can be made into bubble and squeak, a bit of pasta can be tossed with vegetables and some chickpeas for a pasta salad, a couple of rashers of bacon can be made into an omlette. The possibilities are endless; all you need to do is add imagination.
There is a great website that deals with this issue. The Love Food Hate Waste campaign aims to raise awareness of the need to reduce the amount of food that we throw away, and how doing this will benefit us as consumers and the environment.
On the site you will find plenty of recipes, facts about storing food and even suggestions about portion control.
What about you - what is the best recipe you’ve made from leftovers? Do you have a top tip to help reduce food waste?
Please share it with us in the comments below!
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Comments
Mr Green, you’ve hit on one of my major bugbears. Food waste collection is a difficult business for commercial premises and I have read about some who have installed their own facilities such as wormeries. However what I would love to see in restaurants across the country is more modest portion sizes, perhaps not cordon bleu proportions but something that was adequate for most people.
But (LOL) there’s always the Doggy Bag in the meantime ;-D
“But (LOL) there’s always the Doggy Bag in the meantime ;-D”
True and in the US and Cnanda the doggy bag is no embarrassment. Unlike here where we feel almost ashamed to leave something then ask to take it home. Some of these archaic english attitudes have to change to reflect the new environmental needs that surround us.
I glazed over for a moment there, thinking about how it would be awkward to be given a non-sustainable doggy-bag, and whether therefore it would be better to go out to dinner with a little lock and lock type box tucked in your bag for that over generous pate or fish portion… :o)
I can’t help but think it’s a great idea - last time I went out for a meal I did bring half a portion of pate home, but wrapped in a napkin which was a little awkward and eminently temporary!
I also concur with the main issue - I’m not a big fan either of the ‘big plate’ eaterie, I find the oversized tableware needlessly intimidating and a bit uninviting.
On the other end of the scale, my MIL likes to make sure the fridge gets a decent portion of every meal - something we’ve joked about while we still imagine we can eat it all - and she’s excellent at turning it round for the next day in the form of a bake or bubble-and-squeak type dish. As one of the generation a bit lacking in the basic skills I wish I was as confident in whipping up a sauce to bind everything into a meal.
Oh what a gorgeous idea, Kris - a lunchbox in your bag for leftovers 
These ideas bring up all sorts of ethical dilemmas don’t they? You really do have to retain a sense of humour about it all otherwise it becomes overwhelming and paralysing.
I’ve been looking out for some notes I took in a pub several years ago. I just had to whip out my notebook and pencil and write down one of the meals that was on there because I couldn’t believe my eyes at the time. I found it this morning when doing some housekeeping on my computer (at 4.45am no less
Here goes:
6oz steak, 6oz pork chop, 2 lamb cutlets, 6oz gammon, sausage and fried egg.
Another was 2 x 8oz pork steaks with melted cheese and a choice of potatoes.
The vegetarian option was ‘4 Quorn sausages in a giant yorkshire pudding with lashings of gravy’.
Say what?
Your MIL sounds great - Get her hooked up to the site so we can pick her creative brain 
Mrs G x
When I notice things in the fridge that are geting a little close to the best before date, i put them at the front of the second shelf down. It’s at eye level, and you can’t help seeing it everytime you open the fridge. I then know what needs using up, and when thinking about what I am going to cook, I already know what some of the ingredients will be!
When food gets pushed to the back and hidden, it is so easy to forget about it!
I agree Sue. My days as a checkout girl / shelf filler in Sainsbury’s stood me in good stead for this one! It makes such a lot of difference and means you don’t get any nasty surprises.
Mrs G x
I’ve mentioned this on other comments but thought I’d do so here as well.
I freeze any individual portions of leftovers and then either Dh takes them to work for his lunch (he has access to a microwave), or every approx 6 weeks we have a “leftovers night”. The portions are all brought out and we get to pick from the array on the table; so you may have a spoon of lasagne, half a sausage, spoon of mash, spoon of veg.
If I don’t think there is enough veg then I will either do a bowl of salad or a portion of veg, (which as is freshly cooked can be frozen if not all used)
For brunch yesterday there was only myself and Dh, there were some new potatoes leftover from the previous nights tea, so i cooked a couple of sausages and chopped, fried off a couple of chopped mushrooms, and the potatoes chopped fairly small, mixed all together in a pan and added a couple of beaten eggs, made a lovely fritatta style omelette which served with brown sauce hit the spot just right and used up the potatoes.
maisie, your idea is really good, plus it means your dh has a decent meal at lunchtime (which means he’ll probably snack less).
I love throwing together all sorts of weird combinations. That was how I found out that pieces of potato and rice fried in butter is so delicious!
You seem to have minimal food waste down to a fine art. I’m good with things in the fridge, but I must admit, that once they get to the freezer, they tend to get forgotten.
perhaps a freezer inventory is in order next month too.
Fritatta sounds good - really comforting and filling
Thanks,
I remember when growing up that we would have:
Sunday - Roast (piece of boiling bacon cooked with the veggies)
Monday - Boiled Bacon
Tuesday - stew using the leftover joint
Wednesay - shepherds pie or something like
Thursday - Sausage and mash
Friday - Fish of some sort
Saturday - would be either a fry up brunch or a bacon, potato nad onion casserole.
There never seemed to be any waste and we had puddings at least a couple of nights in the week.
Mum would get up extra early on a Monday once a fortnight and have a mamouth baking session (she wasn’t working then); these would last us for the whole 2 weeks with a fruit cake being kept wrapped in tinfoil to use in the last few days when all others had been eaten.
Obviously these were the times when if at school you got a cooked school lunch every day so there wasn’t a problem with packed lunches, although my dad did have one.
it sounds like this kind of thing is in your blood, Maisie and you’ve just adopted these ideas yourself. that’s great - your Mum must be proud that she has passed on something so valuable to you 
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MyZeroWaste.com is our family blog about reducing the amount of waste we send to landfill each week. Follow our progress, leave a comment or two, cheer us on and see if we attain our goal of ZERO WASTE! Check out our monthly competitions, special offers and monthly challenge too! Join in the fun, but remember, this is a serious issue that is crucial for the welfare of our planet.
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I remember a restaurant in Oxford called Browns that had a reputation for serving the largest meals on the planet! And yes, they were gluttonously huge but everyone liked it because they felt they were getting ‘more for their money’ In fact most of the diners left about half of the meal, because it was too much to eat. Now, I wander what happened to all that waste? was it recycled onto the next customer plate, or was it thrown away as waste? Either option is a violation of decency and only adds to the problem that we think it’s ok for our ‘eyes to be too big for our belly’ Food waste due to unrealisticly large portions in restauants is often a deliberate ploy to make us feel better about the bill because we have stuffed ourselves silly. It is immoral when so many people are going without enough food to stay alive.