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?

@DottyHarmer

what is depressing about putting a loaf in the freezer and taking out what you need when you need it?
You would do the same with a bag of frozen peas wouldnt you?

My household is just me and my son. I don’t particularly meal plan, unless I buy something like a cauliflower which is usually too big for us, then I’ll do cauliflower cheese one night and use the rest as a veg another night.
I can’t say we have no food waste, but there is very little, I buy what we need, keep an eye on the use by dates, freeze if necessary, or the cat or next doors dog gets a treat. Every few weeks I’ll run through the freezer to use things up rather than do another big shop.
Its not really that hard.

@TheKeatingFive

Even if your kids eat different things, you can still buy those things in appropriate amounts.

Or freeze things you know you won't use

Not everyone has a lot of freezer space if you rent. That’s a problem our household runs into.

Does the 70% also includes non-consumable food waste like peel, bones, tea and coffee ground, stalks and outer leaves? I don't have a pig or a big composter in my small garden to divide the food waste so all goes into the council caddy.

I found that it is very difficult. to buy small portions of. fresh vegetables, most comes in plastic wrapped packaging and in a size I. don't. want or need. Some vegetables don't freeze well. Get the supermarkets to sell loose products more often, that would cut out a lot of waste.

Currently my biggest issue. is sliced bread, I find previously frozen sliced bread awful when thawed. Under the week I am the only one eating it and it's a lot more expensive buying small loaves so it goes off unfortunately. I don't have the. time or space to have a breadmaker. I do make my own bread but normally only at the weekend.

@cushioncovers

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.

Agreed. Also it’s pretty ableist to think everyone can just pop to the shops every other day.

[quote merryhouse]**@Theyellowflamingo* My food waste comes predominantly from children whose appetite is unpredictable*

Surely that's the very definition of leftovers?[/quote]
I’m not scraping a half eaten dinner into Tupperware and eating it later, sorry. I do keep food back so that there’s not too much on the plate at any one time (so eg I’ll serve two sausages and keep two back and if they don’t eat them as seconds then that’s a sausage sandwich for breakfast), but sometimes half a fish finger or some cooked pasta or some peas or whatever goes in the bin - I don’t call that “leftovers” I call that plate scrapings. Leftovers in my world is a whole portion of something left from eg a lasagna, or meat from a roast carcass - something usable.

They count potato peelings and banana skins and so forth in that total, so I think it's a bit unreasonably high. I compost all that stuff, too, so real waste is reduced

I keep leftovers because I hate cooking so throwing away something that's already cooked is madness to me.

But if we have a busy week and lose track of what's in the fridge then stuff has to be thrown away. I make soup with most of the veg but I can't save everything

[quote Coffeepants]@Aqua55 that seems like a selfish attitude. Do the millions going to bed hungry cross your mind at all?

Always use up leftovers, on rare occasions may throw out bread if not frozen and turning mouldy or brown lettuce but try to avoid this as much as I can by planning meals and using leftovers for lunch, etc[/quote]
Millions going to bed hungry is a problem that won't be solved by someone not throwing away left overs. You know this right.

@Ted27 - as reluctantBrit says, frozen sliced bread tastes horrid thawed and even when toasted. It’s economical and eco, but surely any person with half a taste bud would yearn for some fresh bread. And then of course, unless you demolish the whole loaf some of it invariably goes stale (and, please, NO BREADCRUMB suggestions!).

I live on my own half the year and the other half have 2 DC here (normally at uni)

When they’re here there is v little food waste but when I’m on my own there is more.

I am disabled so I have to get groceries delivered when they’re not here. That means I have to pay an additional charge if the basket of shopping isn’t over £40. So I try to shop online once a week or every 10 days or so depending on what I need.

This obviously means that I struggle to use things up. I only have a small fridgeFreezer with a standard fridge and two freezer drawers above.

I’ve just thrown out 1/4 of a loaf that had gone mouldy and some fresh soft fruit that DD bought the day before yesterday (reading week - she was home) and is mouldy and mush already despite being kept in the fridge.

Sell by/use by dates. I’m on some slimming world Facebook groups if someone posts something a day out if date eg a yoghurt you’d think they were eating poison. Lots think it goes poisonous on stroke of midnight.
Plus lack of confidence storing and reheating leftovers. Sniffing it and re heating it really hot works for me.

I've noticed food goes off a lot quicker since Brexit/pandemic. I assume it's because of problems transporting it efficiently.

Fact is, we don't have enough land/resources/climate to feed our proportionally huge population. Supply links need to be looked at and made as quick as possible.

Obviously people should eat local when they can buy the fact is we don't produce enough food in this country to feed everyone.

Composting is aerobic, so it doesn’t release methane. I compost food waste; peelings, teabags, leaves and such.
We’ve never thrown food away, we don’t have the income to do that, but I do have two freezers and a good idea of appropriate portion sizes.
And an excellent recipe for bread pudding that uses up stale bread and crusts nicely.
Wealthy people are often wasteful and unthinking.

We end up with a lot of food waste because we're a neuro divergent bunch and we buy our safe foods in, and then suddenly they're not safe foods any more, and they're spoiled and can't be used for other things.

We try and compost what we can, though I appreciate it doesn't stop it letting off methane gas.

We stayed over night with friends once and breakfast was cooked. She thought she might run out of bacon as not everyone had appeared yet, so cooked another pack. Turns out there was enough after all so she tipped the entire pack she'd just cooked into the bin!! DH and I were

We are having left over macaroni cheese with ham for lunch. Using ham that was left over from dinner on Thursday. I can't say we never waste anything, but we waste very little. I make a plan for the week and student DS who lives at home and myself who WFH usually manage to use up any leftovers for our lunch. DH will pop anything suitable onto his sandwiches also.

We have a friendly crow family who happily eat up leftovers too - including anything the cat didn't fancy from it's food.

I don’t like bread pudding.

I’m not NT and it’s a texture thing.

Plus. How much bread pudding would I have to eat and how often? I’d be eating it every day for breakfast and dinner

As pp have said it’s difficult if you’re single or small household. I like to cook but often found it wasn’t worth it when I lived alone as I’d end up eating the same thing 3/4 days on the run, which is boring and depressing.

I can’t stand bread that’s been frozen then used in sandwiches, but I could only buy massive loaves or packs of 6 rolls. I often found it was cheaper and easier to eat out, if I fancied a bacon buttie, there was less waste if I went to a cafe and bought one, rather than buying a pack of rolls and a pack of bacon. Not affordable in the long-term though.

We (me and DH) do better now, but still most recepies are for 4 people and it’s difficult to buy small amounts of ingredients.

We always use up leftovers and eat stuff past its sell by date if it looks and smells all right.Cheese, butter and yogurts are always fine. Meat you have to be more careful with.

Meant to add that the reason we have leftovers in the first place (though some are deliberate) is that we are normally a family of 4 when DS2 isn't at uni and it's hard to get out of the habit of cooking for 4 and also that some stuff comes in portions suitable for 2 or 4 (e.g. meat/fish) so buying for 3 generally means buying for 4 and having leftovers.

@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.

Why on earth is that depressing? Sounds sensible to me....

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

This just would absolutely not happen in our house. I would be embarrassed to be bringing up such entitled kids that won't eat leftovers, sorry.

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 can honestly say, hand on heart, that I have never thrown away milk. If you buy what you use, then no need. We do occassionally have to go out for more, if we have guests, but over the years, you know how much you use in a week.

We have very little food waste. All of us, inc. teen DD's use the sniff test on yogurts, meats, bread etc. We will all happily eat out of date items. The cat eats what we can't face!

I have stopped buying bagged salad, as it is not stable beyond a couple of days, and a head of lettuce can last weeks in the fridge.

I compost all peelings, choppings, apple cores etc etc.

Food waste wise (although expensive) I do now buy pre-prepared frozen soffritto, and frozen onions, so have no waste there at all.

In our house, the dog gets the leftovers! I find a lot of my waste is stuff which DH says he would like, such as bananas, specific bread, a particular ready meal, etc. which he then doesn't eat and goes to waste. I also find putting small amounts of food into the freezer means months down the line I find it, and it either has freezer burn or has so much ice sticking to it, it is inedible!

I live alone and freeze everything I can - bread, cakes, meat, vegetables about to turn, batch cooking etc. I live out of the freezer.

As I have a small kitchen with no room for a stand alone freezer I tried to find a fridge/freezer combo where the freezer was bigger than the fridge. Impossible unless I took out a second mortgage.

Having a couple of hounds also helps reduce food waste (avoiding the stuff that is toxic to them obviously).

Never leftovers here. What the teens don't polish off the ddogs get. Never bin any food. Ddogs thrive on the veg that isn't eaten. And the pasta or rice.