UK bins £8bn of food each year.

[Callisto]

"For every three bags of shopping brought home, one ends up in a landfill."

How can this be? I find this quite extraordinary; immoral and obscene. How can this nation be so careless and wasteful and who are the people that can afford to do this?

Green Cone site here

We've got the Green Johanna too - our local authority does a special discount for local residents, I think we paid about £45 for both, whereas full price for both is around £170. I lots of councils do similar deals. You don't have to buy them together, you can just buy one or the other.

imagine how fat the nation would be if we ate it all!

Shopping daily is all very well but on the 3 days I am working the only local shop is ...... Asda. And on the four days I am not there is a baker in walking distance, otherwise it is the local corner shop with a very limited and not very fresh looking supply of fruit/veg. So the veg box is better for me in that respect, also means we are eating seasonal/local stuff - more of a priority than organic to me. Although 6yo DS says all this cabbage is "getting boring" - it's not all cabbage, some is kale and some is chard, but I see his point.

thats a vicious circle Bozza. Supermarkets = less local shops = go to supermarkets etc etc
And supermarkets encourage a huge stock up, which then goes off.
We're lucky in that we live by a high steet with 2 greengrocers, 2 bakeries, butcher (we're veggie but its there) plus a helath shop.

S

I once read a magazine article which compared the amount of food bought and thrown away by three families. I was totally shocked at two of them. One shopping trip could be 120 quid for a mum and her two kids who I think were both under 8. And the bulk of it was bakery/processed/meat items that weren't even touched during the week so thrown out. A whole effing apple pie!! I would feel so incredibly guilty if I threw away so much food. I would say that only a few scraps of leftover potato or rice might get thrown but everything else is eaten. Indeed it is not rocket science to simply buy a bit less, cook a bit less, and freeze a bit more.

Hardly surprising if 95% of the nation are only paying £2.50 for a whole chicken.

I do throw out crusts if I already have a bag of breadcrumbs in the freezer - no ducks near here and our chickens can't have too much stodge (although I do give them any left over rice or pasta - they think it's worms bless them!). Veg peelings go on compost.

For those that boil their meat bones for stock - I'd hardly call what's left 'food waste'.

I think this thread is a lot of people preaching to the converted ! It's really tough if you can only get to a supermarket, and everything is in packets and there's 2 for 1 or 3 for 2, and fresh things are cheaper if you buy in bulk.

I try not to buy fresh stuff from the supermarket - how does a packet know how many people you need to feed? It's far nicer to be able to go to the butcher or whoever and ask them for their advice, then you get exactly what you need. Hey presto... no waste.

Good thread for ideas for how to throw less away!

they do also count peelings and t-bags and suchlike in their 'waste'. We chuck ours on the compost but I quite undertsand people throwing them out. T-bag pie anyone?

Sitting here eating up out of date coleslaw left over from a KFC earlier in the week - its fine. I have drastically cut back on what I buy, and the fridge is pretty empty, so I'm not forgetting what I've bought, then throwing it out, which was my old problem. Especially vegetables, where I bought too many, then chucked them when they went slimy.

The fridge looks so lovely and clean now