Ideas to reduce food waste

[drankthekoolaid]

I've somehow ended up on a work project about reducing food waste (I work for the council and they've pulled people In from unrelated roles) -

I'm quite good at this myself as I shop for fresh food every couple of days to avoid waste but I have nothing innovative to suggest!

• does anyone have any ideas?

I meal plan in a way to reduce waste, eg tonight is roast pork, and tomorrow will be a savoury mixed rice using up the leftover pork and some veg that needs using up.

I batch cook items into portions that suit my family so there's less waste long term, also has the benefit of being budget friendly.

I recently went through my shopping list and cut a number of items out, it's also helping my diet.

Well there's only two of us so I suppose it would be easy to waste loads but I'm pleased to say I don't. Even bag salad I use pretty much the whole lot every time. It works out much better for me than buying a variety of leaves or one boring lettuce. I buy frozen chopped onions as I was always dumping mouldy onions. I only buy potatoes when I'm going to use them as we don't eat them often enough to buy a big bag. I largely ignore 'sell by dates' on most products, whilst buying the longest date I can obviously.

I have well stocked freezer of mainly reduced items and sometimes do meals based on what fresh veg/salad I have to use. If I make a lasagne we have it that night and again a couple of days later so I don't bother freezing it, works better for me. All bread products I'm not going to eat within a day or two are frozen straight away.

What about on a larger scale? Like what is th council's responsibility?

The council maybe needs to hire a sustainable waste expert, rather than get the staff to forage for ideas?

A quick Google shows there are several bag like alternatives to plastic food bags now, so worth looking at.

I like freezing my pasta sauce in flattened bags so they stack better in the freezer, and also defrost quickly, these alternatives will be useful.

A pp referred to eating parsnip peelings. I thought parsnip peelings were one of the few veg. that can't be eaten?

Two things have helped us: a Sharpie and a magnetic notepad.

Sharpie: Uncertainty was leading to a lot of waste in our household. Me: “When did you open the ham?” DH: “I can’t remember, might have been Monday night, oh no that might be the other pack from last Friday. Which shelf was it on?” Everything gets labelled with a marker pen once it’s opened. Same with freezing stuff: no more ‘mystery meat’ of uncertain age. I also mark up the number of days to the eat by date when I freeze something so I know it has to be eatenstraight away or can be eaten a day or so later once defrosted.

Magnetic notpad: we get our shopping delivered so we make a note of the eat by dates on perishable items on the notepad before stuff gets put away in the fridge. We then check the list to see what’s going out of date first & eat up our weekly shop in the order of dates. If they’ve delivered too much short-dated stuff, you can see straight away that you need to freeze some of it & defrost later in the week.

We pay for an annual delivery pass, so we are planning to switch to fewer, smaller shops to cut waste as we think we over-buy some perishable items & others don’t last the whole week (eg soft fruit, salad bags).

Should have said: the magnetic notepad is on the fridge door.

I do a weekly shop at the weekend, and I usually plan and shop for around 5 days meals at a time. That way if our plans change we don't have excess food going to waste, and we usually make the 6th meal something like leftovers, or something from the freezer.

If you're feeding kids, batch cook and freeze foods they like in smaller portions, so you have as much as you need. Stuff like pasta & sauce, risotto, curries etc can be reheated from frozen in the microwave.

Don't go to the shops hungry, or without checking what you've got in the fridge first.

We also use the sharpie to put an X on the lid of the current fruit juice as we kept finding several on the go (we buy 4-5 cartons per week) & no one could say which they’d opened or when.

@liverpoolnana why can't parsnip skin be eaten? There's nothing wrong with it as long as it's been washed. I tend to use a lot of root veg without peeling anyway. Anything to save time.

Meal plan, only buy what you need, and - most importantly - learn how to cook well. I think it's vital to learn how to pull together a proper meal from bits and pieces; following a recipe where you have a list of ingredients is (relatively) simple, but when you've got odds and ends left over in the fridge then it's knowing what to do with them that will really cut down on waste imo.

Buy local. Buy what you need! Promote the buy as you need / zero packaging shops. Educate people about food storage to make things last longer (for eg treat asparagus like a flower and store in a cup of water in the fridge), and about freezing things like fruit veg and herbs. Educate people re the impact of food waste (contaminates recycling therefore lowers value), carbon impact etc. Encourage composting and wormeries (great fun for children). Promote any local businesses like 'junk food cafes' etc and see if you can get anything like that running in any of the larger workplaces.
Sounds a great role! Are you excited?

@SquigglePigs I wash plastic food begs and re-use them over and over again. If I do buy anything that comes in a plastic bag I wash it out and save it. I bought a pack of the zip lock bags about 2 years ago and have not needed to buy any since.

I use plastic containers quite a lot too. Not bought any of those for years. I have some going back about 15 years and keep the ones that takeaway places use (not that we often have takeaway)

Ikea food bags are indestructible.
We've had the same one for cheese (massive sack size) for around two years
Amazon sell cheap Tupperware (own brand) that come in a myriad of sizes.
The 400ml ones are perfect for me.

We meal plan and only buy what's needed for those meals. Top ups later in the week for more bread, milk etc.

I read a tip from Jack Monroe's blog about bagged salad - turn leftovers or cheap short shelflife bags into pesto sauce which can then be kept in a jar in fridge for longer.

Leftover tomatoes get turned into pasta sauce.

Only the 2 of us and I mealplan and shop every 4 days. Dh takes a salad every day to work and we are virtually veggie, so we go through tons of veg. I usually make a soup / chilli the 4 day to use up everything in the veg drawers. I hate food waste.
We eat out a couple of times a week.

Agree with pp that frozen veg make a huge difference. There's a surprisingly big variety of different veg available these days, not just the obvious ones like peas and sweetcorn.

My biggest issue is that lots of vegetables come prepacked in far too large quantities.

I would love if more councils would lobby to have proper markets, ideally 2-3 times a week in larger towns but at least once a week. We go to one and I buy a lot less than if I get the same in my local supermarket because I only buy what I need, I also save on the ridiculous plastic waste,

You need to look at www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/

And WRAP (waste and resources action plan)
www.wrap.org.uk/food-drink