Reducing food waste

[katiemumma20]

Our local council has recently started collecting food waste. I’ve now realised how much food waste I have and i feel awful about it! Does anyone have any tips to reduce food waste? It’s just me and DH and we don’t eat a lot, so for example this week DH made a chilli with 500g mince (as you cannot get 250g online from Tesco’s for love nor money), we ate it for dinner, lunch the next day and still have 2 portions left over. I can’t freeze a lot because our freezer is tiny and we don’t have room for a bigger one or an outside one and it’s pretty much full with frozen meat and vegetables already. My DH also doesn’t eat any fruit, so for example I buy a bag of satsumas and have to eat the whole lot myself before they go off - usually the expiry date is about 4/5 days later. We also eat different bread (brown vs white) and again you can’t get the half loaves online and it’s really hard to eat a whole loaf in a week... and again no freezer space! I realise it sounds like I’m asking for a magic answer and one thing I’m going to do this week is buy less(!!) but just wondered if anyone had any helpful tips x

If you don't have much freezer space, then strictly meal plan. Is all your shopping online? We have a great outdoor market near us where I buy all my fruit/ veg, bread cheese and eggs. Do you have anything similar- great as the quality is better, and you can just buy what you need.

Use up the meat/veg that's in your freezer to clear space.

Meal plan and freeze things in individual portions to be used within the month - flat freezing things in a ziplock bag takes up very little space.

Do your shopping in person where possible so you only get what you need.

Start using your frozen meat in the freezer then you will have space to freeze.

Or for mince, eat half and then convert the other half to chilli or cottage pie and eat a couple of days later.

You can probably find a menu planner online which works out the meals so that waste is eliminated. I use a local one so it's based around the seasons.
Also you might be interested in bokashi composting? It's super easy, doesn't smell, .

I always struggle with freezer space too. I've found it's more space efficient to keep the raw ingredients frozen and cook as I go. You can buy bags of frozen mince and just use what you need. I also buy frozen sausages as the fresh packs never had the number of sausages we precisely needed. Both can be cooked from frozen unless you need the mince soft eg to shape into burgers.

The very best way I've found of reducing bread wastage is to make my own. You might find that too labour intensive but since doing it I've reduced our bread wastage to almost zero.

Get a compost bin for the garden and you can put all your fresh food scraps in it plus any fruit that goes off. Or, as someone mentioned you could put most things in a bokashi system.

As others have said, use the mince for 2x different recipes. Buy fruit and veg as single items rather than in packets (reduces landfill too). The other option, depending on where you live, is to use a butcher's or the butcher's counter in the supermarket - that way you'll only buy exactly what you need.

The only way to avoid it is to meal plan. I meal plan obsessively and we hardly ever throw food away (maybe once every three to six months). There's only two of us. It does mean we have to eat things at least twice but I change what I put with it, eg rice, jacket potato, turn it into nachos, have it in a wrap etc.

Yep, planning is key. We often make spaghetti bolgnaise. Eat that one night, then add spices and kidney beans to a portion of it for Chile con carne, then make a cheese sauce and make the rest into lasagne.

Also, you don't have to throw food away as its use by dates! 'Use by' and 'best before' mean different things. We use things after those dates all the time. Things like meat you should stick to, but other things its more on how they look/smells.

I wasn't too impressed that DH used a can of pineapple he found in the cupboard that was best before 2013! But it honestly tasted fine!

Take best before dates with a pinch of salt, particularly fruit and veg. We sometimes have root veg that are months out of date, if they're not too manky they're fine.

As others have said start emptying the freezer.

Get a soup maker. Make pie from leftover roast. Potatas Bravas from leftover spuds. Bolognese becomes chilli. Leftover curry makes mulligatawny soup etc.

Can you get a better freezer or an additional one on the garage or something? Your bread can just stay frozen, get a slice when needed and all your excess stuff can be frozen.

Yes to all the suggestions above.
Cook several different things with the mince - either by splitting before you cook, or adding different flavours to the second half. So you dont eat spaghetti bolognese 3 times, you have burgers then chilli or lasagna.

I ignore dates on fruit and veg!

Would the pair of you compromise on the bread - either white bread one week, brown the next. Or go for the half and half if you buy it pre sliced?

But yes to buying less! Might also be worth eating through the freezer stock, and replacing it - say eat 2 things from the freezer, and replace with fresher food.

What have you actually got in the freezer? Do you really need it or might that space be better used for leftovers? Bear in mind that you could probably free up some space if you take stuff out of packets where appropriate. We never (ok, very rarely) throw food away but that means that sometimes you might have to eat the same meal two days running (or just one type of bread for a week). I'm surprised you eat so little bread tbh but if it is going stale, why not make breadcrumbs out of it - they keep for ages in an airtight container. Our foodwaste is all vegetable peelings and teabags!

I notice OP hasn't been back, but anyway ... I echo what people say about freezers. When I was feeding a lot of people, I had two freezers. Now, there's just four adults, and a small freezer is enough. If I had a bigger one, I'd fill it, but it's more sensible to let supermarkets store stuff until I need it.

It's mad to cook a week's worth of mince. Cook what you need and put rest in the freezer. Use up what's in the freezer. I aim to have a few bags of fruit and veg (peas, sweetcorn, berries for smoothies), a few ready meals, yeast for bread, breadcrumbs (stale bread whizzed) and a few slices of bread. When I make pizza sauce, I make double and freeze half. Anything else in the freezer is temporary - there's just no room for anything else.

I used to but loads of fruit because I always had, but now I buy enough for a week. I'm the only one eating satsumas, so I wouldn't buy more than half a dozen.

Empty the freezer and buy less!

The only food waste I have is peelings and bones. I buy things loose so I only get what I need and I only throw anything out if it's irretrievable.

Suggest eating up your freezer contents. Use the space to keep a sliced loaf of each bread type and take out slices as you need them. You clearly don’t need as much as 500g mince, so buy 250g online or buy loose from a butcher. Buy fruit loose from a green grocer and ignore dates on them. If you have too much left still, juice or use to make pies or cakes.

Yes definitely use up what you already have in the freezer as the first step, freezer is my number one tool in reducing waste but obviously step 1 is putting leftovers/spare stuff in, step 2 is actually taking it out again and using it! It's a bit anal but I keep a list on my phone of what's in there (as otherwise things can migrate to the back, get freezer burnt and invisible and never emerge again!) and the rule is no-one is allowed to go shopping or add food to the list without checking the freezer audit to see if we already have it (and call me strict but that would include buying nice 'new' fruit, bread etc if we have frozen stuff in the freezer, unless specifically required for a particular recipe - some residents DH are not great at sticking to this but having the expectation at least stops what we used to have of a new loaf of bread, pint of milk and whatever else he fancied coming into the house every time he went past a shop).

Then once a week we have a 'freezer' meal to use up items in there, and once a month we try and have a 'no spend' week where we try and eat entirely from the freezer and cupboards without doing a top-up run to the shops (we don't usually manage the full week, normally we need milk or some particular ingredient before the week's out, but it's a good aspiration). We can then treat ourselves to a nice cake at the bakery or a takeaway pizza with the money 'saved'...

Also for fruit, you don't have to always have fresh fruit, tinned, dried and frozen fruits are just as healthy and also (since this is the ethical board) are often more environmentally friendly, particularly if you go for the popular soft fruits and berries - these can be a bit of an environmental car crash to eat fresh through the winter/out of season, they either have to be grown in heated greenhouses in Europe or freighted in from hotter climates, neither are great at all from an emissions/energy usage point of view, and if you then end up binning them as they go off too quickly that's not great. I'm also the main fruit eater in this family and couldn't get through huge quantities of fresh fruit without it going bad, so I have tinned tropical fruits, pineapple, citrus fruit segments etc alongside dried raisins, mango strips etc and the occasional fruit juice, and I only purchase fresh where it's either available in small quantities I know will get eaten or where it will last longer in the fruit bowl (apples etc)...

Hi there

So two major things if you can be bothered/ can afford the power etc etc.

Save all vegetable peeling apart from potato - At the end of the week boil it down for around 40 minutes and then drain. Voila that's a veg stock to make a soup or stew with. I am trying to reduce meat but if you do eat chicken include the bone in the stock and the stock will be Amazing.

Dry out the ends of bread and in a food processor grind them to make breadcrumbs. You can then used them on top of bakes or for texutre at the end of pasta dishes or in stuffing.

Or cut the old pieces up into chunks and bake in oil then you have some crutons for salad or the top of soups.

We hardly ever throw food away.
Shop at local coop and usually get almost out of date stuff as it’s cheaper and it saves the shop throwing it out.
We do end up with some strange dinners though.

Jacksons sell half loaves of white & brown bread, sold by Ocado and probably other outlets, and Hovis make a range small 400gr loaves, widely available. M&S also have a range of 400gr loaves available in store or on line from Ocado.
Or perhaps consider buying rolls instead of loaves?

You could use frozen fruit instead of fresh, which would mean no wasted fruit. For things like mince, freeze half before cooking it, as it will take up less space with out sauce/liquids etc. Be flexible about use by dates, especially for things like fruit & vegetables. Make soup with leftover vegetables, Spanish omelette is another good way to use up extra vegetables.

lots of good ideas but have you tried reorganizing your freezer (once you've had a go using everything up). I find the packaging things come in is very bulky I often decant into smaller stackable takeaway boxes which stack very neatly and increase space. If you are freezing leftovers freeze zip bag flat so that when solid you can stack really neatly. I had a small freezer for years and that's how I maxed it out.