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?

@MackenCheese

My house is like that of *@Theyellowfamingo*. My kids are fussy, unpredictable and flatly refuse to eat leftovers, even if I disguise them. They can taste when something has been cooked and then gone in the freezer! I eat leftovers , but it's bad for my self esteem/waistline to live on leftovers and plate scrapings all the time...

I agree with this. Yes, bad for my self esteem and waistline...

I think we have a rather entitled attitude to food in the west .Most MC /Average families will "treat" themselves , and often buy more than they need .SM dont help with BOGOF offers either .We are guilty of this too! Try to buy what we need and get extras at local Tesco . I do find it incredible that so much is wasted .Most Restaurants wont waste food though as they would be pouring away their profits! Hence why My Nan would never have Shepherds pie in a Restaurant as all the leftovers from day before! There was a documentary on C5 recently about Tim Martin and Weatherspoons .They would see what was left over in the drinks tray and if there was too much would be in bother !(Maybe we all need to use LO more)!

We used to throw away so much

But I found it disgusting in myself and decided to change.

I meal plan now. I make sure I know the dates by which things run out. So we use it or freeze it

Occasionally I’ve had to throw out chicken because it’s gone bad before it’s sell by date. We rarely throw out bread though. It gets eaten so quick.

I Chuck all vegetables together and make a soup as it’s going out.

I also work with the homeless. I’ve also been homeless. I see what is thrown out. More companies are now giving their food away to shelters etc. So we see a lot of it

If anyone is interested. Costco drives vans EVERY single night. And gives us their food. Without fail. Every single night and we feeds the whole hostel with their leftovers. I have nothing but absolute golden praise for what Costco does for the homeless community. All out of their own pockets!

@Wherearemyminions

My sister does this and it really shocked me the first time I saw it, she opens the fridge just before her grocery delivery is due , with a black bag in hand and literally just throws chicken breasts, fruit , veg, cheese, everything into it. Doesn't look at dates or consider moving to her large freezer, just chucks the lot. We're not perfect but we do try our best to use up, and where possible things go on the compost rather than in landfill

How completely ridiculous, didn’t you say anything?

I know people who throw food out if the date on it was yesterday and it’s 8am, like it’s spontaneously turned to poison within 8 hours

@nimbuscloud

As food rots it emits methane gas thereby contributing to global warming

see i just don't understand. We compost all food waste (except cooked and processed food but there's not much waste of that really) the food obviously rots in the compost, so is that still bad?

@AmaryllisNightAndDay

71% of food waste -... - annually is from our homes.

So shops (especially supermarkets who run just-in-time stock control) and restaurants (especially chains and fast food outlets who buy in a lot of prepared food) have become very efficient at buying exactly what they will sell at any time and no more.

Do people not eat leftovers?

Are you sure that "food waste" only means leftovers and unused food, and not peelings and bones and used teabags?

Yes, I was going to say this second part.

I was listening to George Monbiot on the radio last week and he was saying that a lot of what they count as food waste in these studies is things we cannot really use or things which are composted. He was arguing that these studies were a way to deflect blame on to the individual.

But, obviously, doing mad things like throwing away everything in your fridge every week or letting good food go off means you are either very wasteful or you're buying too much which is also wasteful.

@HesterShaw1

I've always had a compost heap. If people realised how easy it is and how they don't attract rats, more people would I'm sure.

I’d need to create a space in my garden for it. Go out to it. Maintain it. Then I’d actually have to do something with the compost - I’m not interested in gardening, I barely mow the grass, I’m not going to spend ages digging compost into beds etc.

Alternatively I can put food waste, garden waste into a brown bin and the council will compost it for me.

This is why we invented stews, soups, pasta sauces, curries- so we could toss in odd bits of vegetables, bacon on its last legs, an old cup of tea. Otherwise, old veg or meat carcasses- make stock. People who throw away perfectly good savoury ingredients are probably just not knowledgeable cooks and there should be more education about it.

I can't fathom throwing away food. I found a mouldy bit of courgette that had done a kamikaze death dive out of the vegetable drawer and it had to be thrown away- I felt really cheated!

@dottiedodah

I think we have a rather entitled attitude to food in the west .Most MC /Average families will "treat" themselves , and often buy more than they need .SM dont help with BOGOF offers either .We are guilty of this too! Try to buy what we need and get extras at local Tesco . I do find it incredible that so much is wasted .Most Restaurants wont waste food though as they would be pouring away their profits! Hence why My Nan would never have Shepherds pie in a Restaurant as all the leftovers from day before! There was a documentary on C5 recently about Tim Martin and Weatherspoons .They would see what was left over in the drinks tray and if there was too much would be in bother !(Maybe we all need to use LO more)!

Are you speaking about yourself dottie? Please don't generalise or assume how others live...

@MackenCheese

My house is like that of *@Theyellowfamingo*. My kids are fussy, unpredictable and flatly refuse to eat leftovers, even if I disguise them. They can taste when something has been cooked and then gone in the freezer! I eat leftovers , but it's bad for my self esteem/waistline to live on leftovers and plate scrapings all the time...

Can’t you just cook less in general if you know the leftovers will get wasted?

I’m going to be honest. We waste a lot of food. I find it hard to know how much to buy each week, we have a reasonably large family with people not eating at the same time / eating different types of diets / some with autism who will only eat certain things. Meal planning doesn’t work for us. I can try but then xxxx will be out, xxxx won’t eat whatever, xxxx doesn’t fancy it and will just do something else. None of us like eating the same thing for days, none of us like leftovers. I think being honest we’ve all become incredibly spoilt and I suspect that’s the same for a lot of families out there.

But why do you have leftovers @Aqua55? Our food waste is mainly things like peelings, chicken bones etc although we do sometimes have something that has gone mouldy at the back of the fridge but I always feel guilty if we do end up with something like that

@DottyHarmer

I read that bread and potatoes are the worst culprits (in terms of food waste, not the bread and potatoes throwing things out!).

I think for a lot of small/single person households, it is “easy” to waste stuff because you use a few slices of bread only, or half the potatoes. Ok, you can make breadcrumbs and freeze them, but then that’s an awful lot of breadcrumbs building up. Dsis has a frozen loaf and extracts one slice of bread every morning. That is very eco but at the same time a bit depressing long term.

I live alone and I agree with this, especially with veg. I can't eat a whole cabbage or bag of spinach before it goes off, and it doesn't freeze well.

@Theyellowflamingo My food waste comes predominantly from children whose appetite is unpredictable

Surely that's the very definition of leftovers?

Oh, and we use 'Approved Foods'
Website which sells food close to the best buy date
AND also food well within sell by date which has a damaged outer box and can't be sold for example.

Also sells cat/dog food and cosmetics/Christmas things..

You can save money.
Use quidco and you can get money off your first shop too to try it out.

I think some of this is probably down to the gig economy/0 hours contracts too - must be hard to meal plan if your shifts change every week. Especially now with Covid staff rooms aren't always open to heat up food from home for lunch.

Our biggest food waste cause is probably the DC - we have so many plans to cook fresh food and then they get hungry and need to be fed quickly/fall asleep before dinner/get fed at DMs.

BeigeBrownBlue I was simply making the point that we have been guilty of this (as many on here have I would think) But are now trying to simply buy less on a weekly shop ,and if run out pop to local Tesco . The SM are set out in a way to maximise their profits .We have thrown out much less this way .

I'm not sure how potatoes get wasted, I think I've maybe thrown one out in memory, they last weeks/ months if you cut the mouldy patches off

@Shrewoodle

I'm not sure how potatoes get wasted, I think I've maybe thrown one out in memory, they last weeks/ months if you cut the mouldy patches off

I assume they mean counting peelings and the rotten bits you cut out as "food waste."

I bought a bag of Maris Pipers from the CO-OP recently and about a third of them were bad.

I get really annoyed with my DH who will go out and buy food when it’s his turn to cook, rather than look at what’s already in the fridge, and what of that is going off soon.
Honestly, the food I throw away is heartbreaking, but he won’t change.

Thanks for your helpful comment nosy.

My point was that the supermarkets purposely send shorter life stuff when they and we the customer know that there is longer shelf life produce tucked behind it. People who do weekly online shops want food for the week not for two days. Many people do not have the time or money for fuel to keep popping to the shops every 3 days. That in itself is not environmentally friendly. My nearest big supermarket is 10 miles away.

Couple of things going on here I think:

• capitalism encourages us to buy stuff we don't need (not just food) which ends up been thrown away
• people aren't very good cooks
• people aren't very good at judging when food is past its best
• people have their fridge set at too high a temp so food goes off quicker (although having temp lower uses more energy)

It’s selfish to hoard and buy more food than you need. And I personally feel such throwing out food, knowing there are people who would eat those scraps. Common sense tells you but what you can eat.

@User3152672 “Take celery - if I want to make a bolognese, I need about 3 sticks of celery. But I can only buy it as a whole root of about 12 sticks.”
You see that makes me feel very old (or maybe wise!) I always have celery in and probably cook with it a couple of times a week. I never throw it out because it lasts until I finish it, probably when it’s almost a month old. I’d use a couple of stalks for a ragu, a stalk for a Waldorf salad, eat one when I’m grazing, a couple in a stew etc etc.
At least once a week I’ll make a stew or pasta sauce adding sad randoms- soft carrots, half peppers.
The best thing about being a vegan household is being freed from the tyranny of milk. It’s heavy, it goes off, it needs using up. I love not having it in and I love not making rice pudding and crème caramel, just because I don’t want to waste it.

@GoodnightGrandma

I get really annoyed with my DH who will go out and buy food when it’s his turn to cook, rather than look at what’s already in the fridge, and what of that is going off soon. Honestly, the food I throw away is heartbreaking, but he won’t change.

Good point. It's much easier to manage if just one person is doing the cooking and making decisions about meals.