to be shocked that 70% of food waste is from our homes? Do people not eat leftovers?

[MLMshouldbeillegal]

ahdb.org.uk/news/consumer-insight-positive-movements-in-uk-food-waste-reduction-reverse-as-covid-19-restrictions-are-removed

71% of food waste - 4.5 MILLION TONNES - annually is from our homes. Retailer and restaurants get stick in the press for throwing things away but really, they're not the problem, are they? Only 4% of food waste is produced by reailers.

It's us who are being wasteful. Throwing away 4.5 million tonnes of food each year is obscene. Do people not eat leftovers? Freeze what they're not using and keep it another day?

on the counter*

Other thing, I do not plate for them anymore! I gave up a good while ago!
I cook it, they serve themselves and eat it!
They have quite different tastes, so a piece of fried fish can end up with chips and salad for one, and in a roll with mayo for the other. I no longer care in the meantime they eat it, all.

Potatoe storing is something I need to master!
I bet you it is the bag. Because mine have been in all sort of dark and dry places, but no luck yet!
I am going to get one and try that.

My mum used to freeze everything, make soups etc and one sunday a month she would get all the loose ends out of the freezer and fridge and make loads of random stuff (egg fried rice with random vegetables, soup, omelette/tortilla with "mystery things" in them, various pieces of meat, etc etc etc). Then she would lay it all out on the kitchen table and we went around helping ourselves to bits of this and that, she called it "clean out buffet" and we really enjoyed it. Even if we preferred her "real" meals, we found this fun because it was also the only time we were ever allowed to eat sitting on cushions on the floor with the TV on! 😍

@MushMonster

Potatoe storing is something I need to master! I bet you it is the bag. Because mine have been in all sort of dark and dry places, but no luck yet! I am going to get one and try that.

I have no storage space so my potatoes are stored closer than I’d like to onions—they seem to sprout faster

@MLMshouldbeillegal

All the quibbling about whether food fed to animals counts or whether composted food counts - does it really matter??

We as a nation are wasting food. Lots of attention has been heaped on food waste from retailers and they have addressed that for PR reasons and to increase their profits. Restaurants don't want food waste either - it's straight off their profit margin.

But these people routinely chucking stuff out? I get the issue with online orders but there are ways round this. Don't order the salad bags and the soft fruit which does go off quickly! Order apples and pears and bananas and whole carrots and lettuces which last longer. If you want to buy soft fruit and salad, go at the weekend or when you're not working and select it yourself. It seems ridiculous to moan that on every online order you get (for example) raspberries which are a day to their use by date - and keep ordering the raspberres!

Also agree there is a huge issue around cooking and knowing how to use leftovers. One of my kids' favourites is home made samosas made with filo pastry - they're not really samosas as they are baked not fried but they are brilliant for using up odd bits of veg, or small quantities of meat which wouldn't be enough for a meal on their own.

It does matter quite a lot yeah, because there's a move to try and focus more on the problem of individual consumption rather than the more significant structural problems from big companies and in industry. You say here that retailers have addressed this for PR reasons and to increase their profits, but you don't seem to have engaged with the point made by a couple of people that supermarkets frequently engage in practices they know will lead to waste but that essentially shift the blame for it elsewhere.

Supermarkets do very well indeed out of selling produce in large portions that you have to pay for if you want the item but that lots of people won't have occasion to use the full amount of. It's not a surprise to them that a lot of spinach and bagged salad rots before being used, but they're still not selling it in small bags. Because profits. You tell people not to order them, but they wouldn't be able to if the product didn't exist. That makes it, at minimum, an issue where there is fault in more than one place. And that's before we look at things like what happens to fresh produce that supermarkets reject because of appearance.

None of this is to say that there aren't also problems with household food waste too. There certainly are. You are right to highlight the issues around cooking and confidence with leftovers. Plus some people are just irresponsible twats. However, there are big structural problems here that we don't have a hope of tackling if we don't identify them. We cannot do that without accurate information and understanding exactly where food waste occurs.

Mrs. Hrpuff is Russian/Lithuanian, she wastes nothing, not one crumb.
She has the best leftover meal skills I've ever seen.
She also says packet dates are bollox.

We used to keep our potatoes in the garage.

Stopped when we went to make some Sunday lunch roasties and found teeny mouse bites in them.

@Europilgrim

If you store them properly they last ages. Our potatoes sprout within days. I'd love to know how to stop that. I keep them in the dark.

The previous bag I had never sprouted at all. The one before that did sprout so I had to carefully choose the worst ones to use next, removing any growth as I went.

10:26Aqua55

'I don't bother with leftovers. It's my money to waste if I want.'
Trouble is, it's not just your planet, and everyone else's council tax has to pay for your waste disposal. If you don't eat the leftovers then they are going in the bin, attracting foxes, rats etc too.

We as a family waste very little to be honest, we use up leftovers as well so apart from the occasional end of a cucumber that's gone a bit funny I can't really work a percentage it's that low and really don't get how the percentage of food waste coming from households is that high.

Leftovers are my lunch the next day 😊

One of life’s joys

We serve from the table and have always had a rule in this house, if you take it, you eat it. It discourages greed and loading your plate up

I used to work in an all-you-can-eat buffet. The waste was appalling.

@Tlollj

I think people just buy too much in the first place and throw it out if it looks off. I once worked with someone who wouldn’t eat anything the day before it’s sell by date.

My SIL does this. I cook food and freeze it rather than throw but she is ruthless and it is such a waste.

It’s hard to eat leftovers in a big family - there’s never enough leftover to feed everyone so a greasy meal must be cooked - and then of course nobody wants the leftovers. Just as nobody wants yesterdays bread once there is fresh. Sometimes it’s one loaf for 2 days, other times with teens friends it’s 2 loaves in 1 day.

We rarely throw any food away, I don’t buy enough to have any left over to chuck out.

I had an epiphany in Tesco's this afternoon. I was mentally lamenting the decline of loose produce and suddenly realised why it's happened. It's to shift the responsibility of food waste from the supermarkets to the consumer. Bloody typical.

I need to go back to the greengrocer.

I’m currently annoyed with DH, Mr That’s Gone Off, It’s Wasteful. I buy bananas because he wants them. He doesn’t eat them so I made flapjacks with them, which he likes for snacks. He didn’t eat the flapjacks. Again bananas needed using up so I made a banana loaf. When I don’t buy them he complains and buys them. I’m so fed up with this fecking ritual that I have stopped eating fruit 🤦‍♀️ I’d be happy to not buy food.

Rant over.

@Londoncallingme

It’s hard to eat leftovers in a big family - there’s never enough leftover to feed everyone so a greasy meal must be cooked - and then of course nobody wants the leftovers. Just as nobody wants yesterdays bread once there is fresh. Sometimes it’s one loaf for 2 days, other times with teens friends it’s 2 loaves in 1 day.

We don't find this, we would use the leftovers for lunches for one parent or the other, or do something to incorporate the leftovers as part of the next meal. So if there were lots of leftover veg, the next day we'd have something that used them, like a curry, or maybe just make a veg crumble as a side dish.

I don't agree it is hard, it is just a way of thinking/a habit and it can be learnt.

I find the dcs are the Source of most of our food waste. DP and I are careful to cook and prepare only what we’ll need. The contents of today’s food caddy are the remnants of the roast dinner that we cooked that didn’t get eaten - DC3 apparently no longer eats any of the things she liked last time we had a roast dinner. I didn’t get the memo unfortunately!

Fruit is another source of waste at ours - one week everyone loves bananas, the next week I buy extra bananas and everyone hates bananas.

We are trying to discourage this much wastage but it’s an ongoing process!

We never throw bread or potatoes away though, they last 5 minutes in our house, staple food source round here lol

A lot of this is caused by spoilt kids tbh

My DS cooked pasta for his lunch yesterday, far too much so he covered and put it in the fridge. DH is currently cooking tonight’s dinner and DS will be home at 7 - guess what he’s having.

I also don't understand it. Our veg always gets used up in a stew or ratatouille at the end of the week.
Any sad looking fruit gets made into a fruit salad with some lemonade poured on.
Bagged lettuce or spinach lasts ages if you put kitchen roll in the bag to soak up moisture.
BBC GoodFood is a good website to get ideas for new recipes (I discovered a Celery Soup that is amazing and I usually hate celery).
I always take leftover meals as work lunches. There is nothing that I won't eat cold!
I've recently signed up to Olio and regularly get excess food that the volunteers have collected from supermarkets. The amount of bread products wasted is ridiculous. My freezer is now full of baguettes, naans and jam doughnuts.

The only things I throw away are he dog ends of salad bags, occasionally half a broccoli or some spinach that has gone saggy. Maybe a yogurt or two from a pack of six, although I would still eat two or three days past its date if it smells ok.

Otherwise I cook from scratch, and we eat the leftovers for work, or dd if she is at home between classes in the day. Big portions of leftover pasta sauce, chili, stew are planned for another meal and frozen. Now ds is at uni and it is the four of us at home I find I still have plenty of leftovers and they have started building up in the freezer. We'll probably do a search the freezer tea a couple of times until it is empty.

It feels a bit joyless the amount of planning in advance we have to do, but I would rather have proper home cooked meals every day even if it is a but predictable, than filling up my fridge cause I dont know what we'll fancy and throwing half of it away.

The alternative is to shop every day or two. That is probably great in terms of food waste/eating fresh but very cash and time intensive way of living

Nope, do not throw anything, always use up leftovers the next day.
Citrus peel ( if not used for marmalade), apple cores ( if not given to the grandchildren's rabbits), used teabags ( not the plastic ones) , non organic veg peelings ( do not peel if the veg is organic) etc are put into my compost bin and used on the allotment.
I would hate anything I had grown to be wasted.
I also have a human dustbin, aka my husband!
Also, a lot of what we eat is from Olio so I have stopped a certain amount of supermarket waste too.

There is a excuse for it I was throwing up water for 3 days a few weeks ago by the time I managed to look at food in the fridge stuff I had brought only a day before being ill was off. There are some excuses but I agree a lot of people over buy and with my health I've gone back to ready meals as I didn't like the food waste. They cost £6 pounds each but spend less money of rubish, only need fruit, yogurt and breakfast stuff. Way less rubish, worth 6 pounds each as way better than supermarket ready meals, more veg, less salt, less rubish and more choice.