To mark Stop Food Waste Day we’re sharing the practical steps one family takes to try to keep food waste to a minimum. Here’s what dad of one, gardener and keen forager John told us.
Make sure you store food correctly
For a start, storing fruit and veg correctly is half the battle to reducing your family’s food waste in my opinion. For example:
- Don’t put bananas next to other fruit – unless you’re hoping to ripen them.
- Store veg like potatoes in a dry, dark place.
- Don’t put things like onions and butternut squash in the fridge.
- Keep food that needs eating first near the front of the fridge.
Here are some tips to help you keep food fresh in the fridge for longer.
Save those scraps
Don’t throw out odd bits of veg like onion, carrot peel and potato peel. I usually just boil it all up to make a tasty stock to use in broths and gravy. If you’ve got a bit of freezer space you can pour the cooled stock into ice cube trays to defrost and use as the base of a stew or soup in the future.
There’s plenty of other things you can use bits of old veg for too – for example, you can:
- Use potato peel to make fries or soup.
- Pop orange peel in a water bottle to add flavor.
- Use tiny bits of veg to top homemade pizzas or veggie muffins.
The Love Food, Hate Waste website has some delicious leftover food recipes. And if you have some leftover cooked veg, it works really well in soup. Here are some recipes from the Family Action website:
Rescue ripe fruit and make a smoothie
Try not to throw away fruit that’s a bit too ripe or a weird shape. Instead, throw it into a smoothie – the more colourful the better!
You could also prepare and freeze any fruit that might go to waste. Berries often don’t last long in the fridge but they freeze well, so take off any stalks, wash and dry them, and then pop them into a labelled and dated freezer bag.
Ripe bananas also freeze well, but to make life easier peel them and slice them before freezing. Then you can throw the frozen fruit straight into the blender when you need to make a smoothie.
The freezer is your friend
Since we’re talking about the freezer, it’s worth pointing out there are lots of other foods you can freeze to reduce waste. For example, my mum lives on her own and doesn’t eat a lot of bread so it can go off quickly. Keeping it in the freezer and just taking out a couple of slices each time she needs it helps reduce her food waste – she can pop it straight into the toaster without even having to wait for it to defrost! And if you happen to have a few crusts of bread left just chop them up, add some herbs and make some crispy croutons.
You can also buy bags of frozen fruit and veg that are handy to keep in the freezer. They’re useful for reducing your family’s food waste, as frozen produce lasts longer. Also, they’re great if you need to throw together a quick meal at the end of a long day, since they tend to be prepared before being frozen too.
Walk on the wild side
Don’t forget that, depending on the season, there’s a lot of ‘wild food’ that can easily go to waste if it’s not picked and used – like blackberries, apples, and wild garlic.
Personally, I’m a great fan of collecting nettles in spring to make nettle soup. This is also when wild garlic is in season. And in late summer and autumn, we pick and freeze blackberries and stewed apples ready for use in the winter in tasty fruit pies and crumbles.
Take a look at the Woodland Trust website for a useful guide to foraging sustainably and picking blackberries.
Put your leaves among the leaves (and your grounds in the ground)
If, like us, you like tea – and lots of it – chances are you’ll have lots of teabags ready to throw out. Don’t just throw them out – sprinkle the tea from the used bags around the base of plants to help them grow. You can also collect used coffee grounds in a bowl and then add to your plants as fertiliser. Here’s more information on how you can use tea bags in the garden.
Use food up with creative cooking
We all know it’s a good idea to make a list before going food shopping, to avoid being tempted and buying more than we need. But have you had a good look through the kitchen cupboards and freezer recently to use things up before they reach their use-by date?
When you take everything out it’s quite surprising what you find. Who knew we had six (six!) different half-eaten jams? Do we really have three bags of frozen peas at the bottom of the freezer? With these discoveries one thing we’ve done to reduce food waste is to use up what’s in the cupboard and freezer before buying new jars, tins and frozen veg. We’ve certainly become a lot more creative in our cooking!
Here are some more recipes if you need inspiration:
Share the surplus
If you’re lucky enough to have an allotment or space to grow some veg there will probably be times of the year when you have a surplus. Rather than let your excess veg go to waste, share with your friends and neighbours, or cook up, leave to cool and freeze in portion sizes to use in the future (always label and date containers). You could also donate to the local food bank or food club.
Visit our Food On Our Doorstep page to learn how Family Action’s Food Clubs are reducing the amount of food being sent to landfill.
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