How much food do you waste,if none how do you manage that?

[SundayFunday555]

Intrigued as to what is deemed as a good amount and how people get to zero.

We have a Labrador so food waste does not exist in our house 🤣. The only thing going in our food waste bin is tea bags, potato peelings, apple cores and onion skins. The Labrador will even eat the ends of carrots and salad given half a chance!

If you're buying a loaf of brown and white just take half out of each when you get home, relocate to the other bread bag and stick one of those in the freezer.

We compost food waste, which is mostly vegetable anyway and that makes me feel less bad.

Very little - a bit of milk goes off occasionally, sometimes some bread or cheese if they go completely mouldy. The occasional tomato, or piece of fruit if not eaten before it goes bad. Not really anything else.

We both treat ‘best before’ dates as very much ‘only advisory’. Meal plan before going shopping. Batch cook and freeze extra portions where it makes sense.

If we have gluts of things we will freeze the excess, either as they are or make something from them that can be frozen or bottled.

We compost everything that can sensibly be home composted without a ‘hot compost’ bin (i.e. everything but meat, bones, citrus skins, etc.)

We had katsu curry with rice last night and about half way through my middle child said she wasnt feeling too well. So she left about 2 tablespoons of rice and half a breaded chicken breast covered in katsu sauce (so it was quite soggy!). Would you have put that in Tupperware? I don’t think anyone would have eaten those leftovers (especially as it turns out we think she has scarlet fever 😏)

@Greengagesnfennel

Or more than one that has a shockingly short use by date.

Just hand back to the driver who'll give you a refund (and often let you keep the item anyway!). We have deliveries occasionally from Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda, and Iceland, and never had a problem with the drivers taking back short dated stuff.

Even if you don't notice upon delivery, you can phone customer services who will likewise give you a refund over the phone for short dated/damaged items.

It may not reduce your own food waste, but at least you've not paid for it!

Interesting point from PP about the ripeness of fruit and veg when you buy it. That's why I always buy my fruit and veg, I'd never get it delivered or click n collect. This morning for example I bought a bunch of bananas that are ready to be eaten now, and another bunch that was much greener for in a few days.

We have very little food waste: 2 adults, 1 teen, 1 preteen. I cook almost 100% from scratch and know exactly how much everyone eats. My DC always finish their plates but I dont overload them.

I weigh pasta, rice and potatoes before cooking so I don't cook too much (or too little).

I meal plan and buy fruit and veg accordingly. Things like yogurt- I keep an eye on the dates and if there's a lot left I just tell my family they need to prioritise those items.

I batch cook and freeze whole meals (well casserole, mince etc) but I don't freeze leftovers or fruit/veg that are going off because we don't have any.

Yes we clear our plates (and often have seconds…). We often have leftovers which go in Tupperware and can be reheated for a quick lunch or whatever. We live rurally so there is no ‘popping to the shops’ so we make sure food is not wasted at all. Vegetables that are past their best go into soup. I ignore use by dates.

I wouldnt save the bit of chicken and wouldnt really consider that 'food waste'

The rice, if it was 'clean', I would have put that in a pot because that can be chucked in soup as a thickener, you can freeze it and just chuck it in.

Ah ok. Well that’s the sort of food waste I’ve been talking about all thread when I’ve said that we have some food waste.

Well I suppose each person has their threshold, for me its more about food that is overbought and chucked out either because people dont store it properly (freezing) or because they believe in 'use by' dates (which I dont) or because they dont work it into their meals because 'I dont fancy it now'

A few left overs on a plate I wouldnt consider food waste, but someone cooking up a huge meal EVERY TIME, and only eating a few bits of it, like my OH unfortunately, I do consider wasteful. But then he thinks Im obsessed and its all unnecessary.

I guess I was looking at it in a literal ‘how much is in your food waste bin at the end of a week’ sense. The vast majority of our food waste in our waste caddy is the extremely unappetising leftovers scraped off a child’s plate (a poster above said that she’d put these in a Tupperware container but I honestly can’t imagine anyone in our family wanting to eat 1/4 of a piece of steak or the fat off a pork chop that one of my kids has left, to be honest!), or the crusts of sandwiches bought home from a packed lunch for example.

Thank you so much, this is so helpful

Oh yes I see what you mean

I dont put any in a caddy anyway, I wont have one in the kitchen.

I do love a bit of fat though I must say!!!

Very little to be honest. The odd piece of fruit turns before we get to it, and sometimes we don't get to the end of the milk, but it's nowhere near enough to get upset about.

Floppy carrots and sprouting potatoes are still perfectly edible. Just cut the sprouts out and put the carrots in a soup.n

I do cut bits off bits too, so bit of mould on the cheese, cut it off.

Bit of soft bit on some veg, cut it off.

Not much. If anything gets wasted it’s salad type things that go over too quickly in the fridge or DSS2’s dinner because he is a very picky eater (but mostly we eat it) In fact that’s how we avoid most waste-we eat it all-which is also why we are too fat.
(I also do a rough weekly meal plan and shop specifically for it which we stick to most of the time).

We sometimes make a small amount of veg soup and freeze it if we can't think what else to do with a few bits of floppy veg. Or we bury it in a curry, stew, stir fry, pasta bake.... I've even taken to googling the remaining fridge contents just to see if anyone has come up with an idea for an odd combination that's palatable. You would be surprised!

Our large food caddy gets pretty full each week with peelings, cauliflower leaves, chicken carcasses, egg shells, orange peel, banana skins. I can’t compost as I’m terrified of rodents and when I tried, our bin ended up full of mice 😬
I can’t think of anything we throw away on a regular basis, I wfh so mainly eat the scraps for lunch!

Occasionally I will throw away half a lemon that's been forgotten at the back of the fridge, or a bendy, black carrot. I achieve this by regularly eating leftovers, which often isn't much fun. Eg I'll eat one raw soft carrot, half a plate of pasta from two days ago, half a slice of stale toast, two spoonfuls of yoghurt that no one else will eat.
I also make sure my kids eat what they put on their plates. They always serve themselves and I make sure that they don't have big helpings. They can have seconds if they're still hungry after the first helping, but I don't allow piling your plate full of food and then eating only half.

Virtually none - I shop to a list - look for longest dates - freeze meat fish etc unless I intend to use it fairly quickly - leftovers get frozen if enough for a meal - smaller quantities are for lunch at work
If something is on its way out we eat it - as a previous poster says it leads to novel food combos
Eg last night we had chilli - I put all veg that needed eating in to it including leeks, courgettes and aubergine - we didn’t have any rice with it but served in bowls with some chopped avocado on top that needed using

A lot gets wasted in my house. I have an autistic 7 year old who only eats half of what I give him but constantly eats during the day (like a conveyer belt of food). He's really skinny so I'm not going to stop giving him food constantly.

Compared to most people on that thread we waste a lot. I don't freeze leftovers and have stopped freezing bread as it seems soggy or strange textured when defrosted.
I don't set out to batch cook, sometimes if making stew or Bolognese I would make extra but not always. Trying to do more of that.
We throw away things like cream cheese that someone has opened and then it's mouldy by the time the next person looks.
Also milk, cheese, last slices of packets of cooked meats.
I don't make stock or broths. Don't have animals. Eat what we want and don't meal plan - dislike eating the same food twice in one week and definitely not two consecutive days. I know a family with a weekly rotation of meals and can't imagine living like that.
I don't think we waste lots but compared to people here using bread for breadcrumbs or making soup with veg that are past it, I just wouldn't be in that mindset.

We have actually been talking to DC about respecting the farmers who grow food and the animals we eat and how we should try to avoid waste. But doubt we will ever get close to zero.

I don't consider your dc's sandwich crusts or pork chop fat to be 'food waste'. They had it, they tried it, they left some bits they didn't want.

True food waste is you, as an adult, buying things and either not having a plan for how to use it, or changing your plans and not finding a way to store / freeze / reuse the ingerdients.

Maybe (marginally) if your dc NEVER eats the crusts, then cut them off before making the sandwich and make them into breadcrumbs and freeze.

Some veg peelings you can make things with (oven fried loaded potato skins) or put in soups. But you shouldn't put potato peelings on the compost heap. And there is pretty much nothing you can do with banana skin, the pods from broad beans, or the hard skin of a pomegranate - apart from put them on a compost heap.