As you know I hate waste. According to Love Food Hate Waste we throw away 7 tonnes of food and drink each year which is costing us costing us a staggering £12.5bn.
A lot of the blame gets put on our “throwaway culture” but I don’t think that anyone wants to waste food. Instead I think there are 4 main issues…
- People are WAY too sensitive about best before and use by dates. I always say that your food doesn’t have an internal calendar, it doesn’t wake up one day and say “HEY! I’ve gone off”. It’s quite possible the food may have turned bad before the best before date so get in to the habit of sniffing and looking at your food before eating it.
- People don’t really know the best way to store food.
- Lack of planning.
- Left-overs aren’t seen as the thing to do. You can make amazing meals with left overs, I often have a “throw everything in the pan” meal and make some weird and wonderful concoction with left over veggies. Or else if things are about to go on the turn and I can’t use or freeze them I whip up a gourmet meal for my dogs (they LOVE veggies).