to ask, who wastes all the food?

[amigababy]

So Tesco is removing the best before dates on its own fruit and vegetables.
Wrap, the food waste body, say that in Britain families throw away £700 of food a year ( I've read that a few times over recent years). So for me that would equate to 10 full weeks of shopping every year, discarded. More, if I assume at least 10% of every weeks shop is non food items.

I reckon I throw away maybe a £ a week of food - half a bag of salad, a half tin of beans that sat in the fridge too long, the last slice of ham. So at worst say £60 a year. Who's throwing away all the rest to get to these averages? I want to understand.

I think they need to replace the "Best Before Date" with a date showing when it was put on sale. If I want to buy a week's worth of fruit, I really don't want to buy the stuff that's been sitting there for a week already.
Is that just me?!

Do you not think all the recently put out food would be snapped up, and you'd still be left with week-old food?

windy you can specify long use-by dates on Waitrose deliver in the preferences box

We waste zero food, anything we do throw out we give to the chickens or dogs.

My ex. Oh god. We always ate meat when we bought it or put it in the freezer if it wouldn’t brused quickly enough, but packs of fruit and veg... he’s just chuck out as soon as the date arrived. Peppers, apples, oranges... everything. I lost my shit at him for it because we grow a load of stuff!! And he’d only throw out the home grown stuff when it looked off, but would chuck out shop bought stuff that was still perfect just coz of the date! There was no logic to that but “the date says it’s off”. He stopped once I had a proper meltdown at him for it.

He was the same with the sat-nav. In my hometown, the sat nav wanted to go a road which always had cars parked down both sides, pot holes and kids running around, so no one used it as a through road - we would just go round the 30 second longer way. I told him to ignore the sat nav and I’d direct him, but he wouldn’t. We got to the turn, and he turned!! Whilst saying “the sat nav says so I don’t want to get lost”. I grew up there and lived 2 minutes from that road... but he couldn’t listen because the sat nav told him something else.

The only flood that gets chucked in my house is half eaten toddler food and I hate that waste. So luckily a lot of it can be eaten by my chickens. I’d say someone else is throwing away my £700 worth.

My mil has been known to bin ham that’s near the date ie still got a few days on it.

I freeze everything bar salad. Even half tins of beans get frozen.

I throw out very little.

My DC when they were younger. They were taught at school about use by dates and won't listen to me. I point out that nothing magic happens at midnight to make food go off.
I may be cynical but doesn't this mean Tesco can leave stuff on their shelves longer if they don't have a BB date?

Yes, I know, I can select long dates. But apparently they can’t actually do this in real life. Also they used to give the short date stuff foc if it had less than 24 hrs on it, but no they shrug and tell you it’s the best they can do.

@Mumofboysx2

Why didn’t you freeze the chicken? You can roast a whole chicken straight from frozen - just add on 50% of the original cooking time.

Who throws away a whole chicken...

My mum always went by the 'sniff test'. If the chicken smelled OK, then it'd be fine. Today I opened some pomegranate seeds which were 3 days over date - they smelled fermented so I chucked them.

I think a lot of people get confused between Best Before and Use By dates, which is why they're simplifying it. Best Before refers to quality, so the food will taste better before the date stated but it won't be harmful to eat unless you go beyond the Use By date. I know so many people who will thrown food out on the Best Before date even though it's perfectly safe to eat.

My DM. she's on her own, dsis takes her shopping every week LEAVES HER to shop on her own (she's 90 fgs) she buys the bogofs. The food is rotten even before she gets it home. She won't cook. I go , i stay every month because I live abroad and have to throw out MOST of the food in her fridge it's upsetting. I do my best to give the leftover bread\dried food to the birds\foxes whatever in the wood over the road from her. I blame the shops for reducing the old food instead of giving it to the food banks before it goes off.

Me, a few nights working late, too tired to cook what I should have or make tomorrow’s lunch leads to a lot of waste some weeks.
I do Freeze what I can, but don’t have much space. Don’t shop some weeks to try and live on what I’ve frozen etc.
Min supermarket spend for delivery doesn’t help either.

We never throw away good stuff just because it's technically out of date, but we are bad for letting stuff fester in the fridge until it has to be thrown away, rather than eating it up. Yesterday I threw away a barely touched tub of cream cheese that had gone green, a cucumber that had gone liquid and half a tub of ready-made soup that had grown fur. Obviously we couldn't have eaten any of those now, but we should have eaten them before they met these sad fates! We have got better with better meal planning, but we could try much harder - this thread has reminded me to make a renewed effort!

We ignore B.B. dates and sniff/look at the food before reluctantly discarding if necessary. We do meal plan and rearrange the planned meals if something is turning quicker than we thought.

Not in our house. We live by the seat of our pants! We eat bacon a week out of date, cheese a month out of date (it has probably been sitting in a refrigerated warehouse for the last two years, a few weeks won't hurt)
If it smells ok, we eat it!

To throw away £700 worth of food a year you have to be either incredibly stupid, mentally ill, or just a nasty (rich) wasteful person.

My kids. My son is a very keen cook but if anything looks just a bit 'funny' (or the milk is bobbly) he throws it out.

I think in their case, it's a result of being brought up with no money and having to often eat stuff that was, ahem, perhaps not as fresh as it could have been. They never got ill, but sometimes the texture was a problem. Now he earns good money I think he just thinks he's never living like that again.

My family tend to throw things out as soon as they are past their use-by date, so I learnt long ago to remove or obscure the labels as much as possible. If they knew how much out of date food they've eaten without any ill effects, I suspect they'd be horrified.

I have massively reduced my waste since I've been carefully meal planning. I now pride myself on throwing an absolute minimum away.

Incidentally this has just bitten me on the arse as I finished almost 100% of the fresh food in the house before going away for the weekend. I got home last night to bare cupboards

But even at my profligate worse there is no way I was chucking out £15 worth a week

I’m awful for food waste, I meal plan and do a big shop once a week but then something changes and that meal turns into emergency oven pizza or similar and the ingredients end up going off, or the smallest quantity I can buy is more than I need for that meal and I don’t know what to do with the rest of it. We are away a lot so it it doesn’t get eaten when planned it generally goes off. I am hopeless at concocting meal ideas from random leftovers and with a young toddler in tow it’s not easy to just pop into a shop on the way home to get the one extra thing I’d need to make the random leftover food into an edible meal. My DH is much better at use stuff up meals.
I can totally see why single people throw a lot away as a lot of things bulk packaged for families. As a student I’d make one meal and eat it for 4 days or freeze a couple of portions, people who are used to being a able to have a variety of meals don’t necessarily want to do that. They don’t always have the time, inclination or freezer space to portion up and freeze desperately the bags of mince etc that are all too big.

Even half tins of beans get frozen

Genius! @Fluffycloudland77

It has never even occurred to me to freeze baked beans. I live on my own and one tin can last me for 3 servings, but then if it's been open for a couple of days I'll chuck it in the food recycling. Those small 'one person' tins are so expensive and still a bit too much for me in one go.

Do you reckon it would work with spaghetti hoops?

The rest I'm pretty good on, apart from bread. I hate thawed out bread as it goes really dry, but I struggle to get through even a small loaf by myself before it goes stale.

My MIL! It's frankly crazy, even if it's in date but she's going out for a meal the food is thrown away. The last time I was there she gave me 4 beef steaks (all in date) and my SIL regularly gets stuff off her. She said she tries to time her visits when my MIL is clearing the fridge (regular occurrence!) By contrast my own parents are so frugal I worry about them (but they aren't short of cash).

Well Tesco can kiss my arse, I won't shop there again, I will only buy food that I know is the freshest, so I can do my shop knowing the fruit and veg will last a few days. Who wants to spend money on say, apples, that look fine but go off next day? So we have to throw them away then anyway! I know there are people staving and I am so sympathetic about that and do all I can to help, but if I want or need to throw food away, who are supermarkets to tell me otherwise, I've paid for if after all. And if Tesco really want to get in to it, why not reduce their prices so people can afford to buy food they that Tesco would rather dump it than reduce the price, so they're basically doing what they're telling us not to do, what a bunch of hypocrites.

I don't know why people don't use their freezer more. I put LL meat in the freezer immediately. For one thing, chicken that has been frozen is protected from bacteria, whereas fresh could be harmful.

At the end of the week, I look in the fridge and make something to use up everything I can before shopping again.

But the best way to avoid waste is to shop like our parents did - daily. Look in the fridge/cupboards, then go out and buy whatever you need to use up what's left. But I suppose no one really has the time.