Food wastage

[forgotmyusername1]

Apparently the average family throws away £800 a year of food.

I can honestly say we throw next to nothing.

What are your top tips for avoiding food wastage?

Are you a user or a chucker?

We waste virtually nothing. I meal plan every 4 days , which rarely includes meat. I make a veg soup every week with any leftovers in the salad drawer.

Its not quite burning money though is it? I think food waste happens when people want variety and have to a buy an entire packed of ham for a sandwich and then don't want to eat ham sandwichs everyday. Or want salad with one meal but not every meal.

I do my best not to waste food but there's an awful lot of mental effort and planning going on on this thread and I do not have the time or the energy to do half of what most of these posters are doing. It's paying for ease and convenience

Also I think you have to be careful that your not using loads of single use plastic to preserve your food. If meat is being bagged in single use bags in the freezer then that's not great. And I feel like throwing out a plastic bag or clingfilm is no better than half an onion or some cheese

You can use reusable tuppaware or reusable ziplocks but that's even more effort and that still eventually ends up in landfill, and then you've got a big chunk of plastic to break down rather than a small one.

We waste almost nothing but I meal plan and DH loves leftovers for lunch the next day. When he’s away with work I freeze any leftovers - find it hard to cook for three now I’m so used to cooking for four! - and he has a stash of Tupperwares to work his way through when he comes home. Added benefit of saving money as he then doesn’t need to buy lunch at work.

What? Surely you just wash the bags if you use bags. Tupperware lasts for decades so is the absolute opposite of single use.

In your ham example I would make a chicken and ham pasta bake for dinner or chicken and ham pie. Buying a pack of ham doesn't mean you have to have ham sandwiches for a week or chuck it in the bin.

Hams a bit of a rubbish example because it's easy to use and lasts a relatively long time. But my point was food waste isn't just chucking away money, it's because its convenient and people want variety.

And that's only viable if you've planned a chicken pie or a chicken pasta. Which takes time and effort, its a lot easier to just throw out the ham. Which again is why it's not just burning money, it's paying for ease and convenience

You completely ignored my point about the mental effort of all the planning, cooking, freezing, getting out the freezer that everyone's doing. That's the main barrier not people being silly about dates

What I don't understand is how they produce these statistics. Are researchers going through people's food waste bins with a fine-tooth comb? "You could have trimmed this green bean much closer to the tip, you know!"😁

Or are they relying on the subjects to log their own food waste? Do people have to weigh food before discarding it? If you're so careless that you chuck out half a leftover takeaway, you surely couldn't be bothered to log it all carefully for science.

You completely ignored my point about the mental effort of all the planning, cooking, freezing, getting out the freezer that everyone's doing. That's the main barrier not people being silly about dates

How is it mental effort to put something in the freezer? I’m highly stressed and overloaded and frequently breaking down in tears at the moment due to having way too much going on. Even I can put half a pack of ham in the freezer.

It will still end up in landfill and it will still need to biodegrade. Better than single use plastic obviously but everyone going out to buy tuppawares that take 1000s of years to break down is not a fantastic environmental solution

And dishwashing also has a fairly large environmental impact. Heating water to temperatures to sterilise the bacteria, soap going into waterways.

Again it's a balancing act. And the best option is to just only buy as much as you need.

I think you’re making excuses. Most things will eventually end up in landfill but Tupperware can literally be used thousands of times.

Have you read some of the posts
'Oh I just divide all packets of meat up, meal prep, just whip up veg soup, religiously meal plan'

There's a lot more mental effort going on than just putting jam in the freezer

I mean your posts absolutely answer the questions posed by the OP.

I think that sort of thing is just normal living but clearly some people don’t.

I'm not making excuses, as I said I don't waste much food. But there's a lot of people on this thread pontificating about how great they are, and how stupid others are and it's not that simple and doesn't really solve the problem of food waste.

Food waste is an issue because of our consumerist society, people no longer have the time they had 50yrs ago. We have a society built around ease and convenience. Supermarkets selling large bags of meat or veg rather than going to the butchers or the market and buying what you needed which would have happened years ago. I don't think the problem will be solved by removing dates or mass freezing. The problem of food waste is much deeper

And yes of course you use your tuppaware 1000s of times, but someone who's too lazy to plan to use up their food won't. They will use it 20 odd times and it'll get stained and then they'll throw it out.

I'm not surprised by the average amount of food wastage in a year. I don't eat most food that is past it's use by date and I very rarely eat left overs because I don't want the same thing two days running. Now that use by dates have been removed from some vegetables and fruit, I'm tending to throw more away than in the past as I've got no idea how long they've been sitting in the fridge. My husband is the opposite and I regularly catch him eating yoghurts and cheese that are out of date.

I hate food waste. We waste almost nothing. We freeze bread and milk as they are the items most likely to not get used in time. If any bread does end up starting to go stale I make it into breadcrumbs and freeze them.

I use any veg that is getting old for soup. If there is just a small amount of veg I put it in a freezer bag and freeze until I have enough to make soup.

I have eaten yoghurts weeks out of date and never been ill.

I have recently started using the peelings from potatoes, carrots etc to make vegetable stock so not even that gets wasted

We chop up carrots, peppers and freeze them. I’d say our biggest wastage is fruit- sometimes we just have unhealthy weeks or the fruit is already going bad or if we don’t remember to chop up pineapple and put in the fridge it’s gone. Lettuce we can be really bad for🙈We never waste meat, although Aldi meat is sometimes gone off before it’s due date. Overall not too wasteful but we don’t do the mn chicken thing either!

I think a lot of people have lovely big fridges and freezers.

Essentially this thread is exactly the same as the how many times do you wash your towels. It's just more competitive domestic labour

Tbh I've never needed to do most of the things on this thread. My cheese just gets eaten. My veg never goes off before it's gone in the dinner. I just work my way through a loaf of bread

The best and simplest way to prevent food waste is to only buy what you need and compost the waste. But I really wouldn't be too concerned about the consequences of throwing out an end of stale bread or a fraction of cheese or one limp carrot. I don't think the environmental impact of throwing out a small amount of bread is any worse than all the plastic, washing, soap etc. that goes into the environment to try and preserve it, and at least the bread will biodegrade

It will still end up in landfill and it will still need to biodegrade. Better than single use plastic obviously but everyone going out to buy tuppawares that take 1000s of years to break down is not a fantastic environmental solution

No need to buy tupperware. We freeze things in old plastic takeaway containers that are usually from me taking home a doggy bag because restaurant meals are too large so to avoid waste I take what I can't eat to have for lunch the next day. So it's the very opposite of wasteful or time consuming because then I have a meal that I haven't had to cook or buy ingredients for.

We always run the dishwasher crammed full, so far more efficient than washing up by hand.

The tubs are reused many many times and when they eventually break/wear out, they go in the recycling, so not in landfill anyway, not that a lot of non recyclable waste goes in landfill, it's usually incinerated in waste to energy plants these days.

I never get comments like this. Don't most people have a normal fridge freezer?

You don't need loads of room to freeze a few takeaway boxes and yet MN often comments about fridge freezers as if they're unobtainably aspirational, despite nearly all households having them (I don't know anyone who doesn't and my friends/family/acquaintances are nowhere near as affluent as the MN demographic).

The main barrier in your example is people knowing how to cook.

I agree - this is something which a lot of people can't do which is a shame as making a quick pasta dish with some ham in it is much cheaper and healthier than chucking the ham and pinging a ready meal in the microwave.

My two boys enjoy cooking. We did flapjacks and brownies yesterday (not healthy lol) but my 11 year old announced he was going to cook tea tonight so we will plan that later today and I will supervise his efforts.

We though are a cooking household. My husband is a better cook than I am. We make our own bread, yoghurt, jam and batch cook to make ready meals.

We compost vegetable peelings but vegetables are very cheap. £800 a year, so £2.20 a day, how is that possible?

I honestly never throw anything except the odd last onion/cherry tom/potato in a bag that's gone bad. Although this is getting harder with food deliveries and the standard they send!

Meal planning, or at least only buying 3 fresh meals if I know we're out on a few days of the week etc.

Varying sizes of pots so I can freeze items in portion sizes.

Storing fridge items in plastics boxes so they don't go off prematurely by being not sealed eg ham, cheese.

And a whippet. If all else fails, she'll have it for her tea.

I’m just cooking for myself so I only buy what I know I’m going to eat.

No bagged salads because I know I wouldn’t get through them, and unless it’s for a specific use I only buy frozen veg.

Apples & bananas are my main snacks so no problem using those up, and berries, grapes & cherries get frozen together & used when I’m prepping overnight oats for breakfast.

Veggie so I don’t buy meat, and I don’t worry about sell by dates on dairy unless something looks or smells bad.

There’s no mental load involved, but I can see things would be harder if I wasn’t on my own.

Our main food waste is when I overmake pasta and rice, notorious for it. I still struggle with the girls not being here any more, then when they come home it throws me out again.

Bagged salad goes slimy, vegetables go off really quickly these days, broccoli in particular. Potatoes often go soft.

Mozzarella often blows out though.

I eat things like yoghurt and cheese and eggs well past date.

I don't eat bread crusts.

So, although I freeze and eat many things past date, this all adds up to food waste.