The Waste Land
Food Waste Action Week’s annual campaign takes place from 6th – 12th March this year, with the theme, “Win. Don’t Bin.” It aims to demonstrate how valuable food is in our lives, how it unites people and how using up everything we buy saves money, time and the planet.
We’ll certainly second that!
We like these designated days, or weeks, as they give us a great opportunity to raise awareness of the climate crisis, what’s contributing to it and what we can do to help avert it.
This year’s campaign aims to increase our confidence in using up leftovers by promoting a range of skills that can be easily adopted but potentially have the greatest impact on reducing food waste in the home. Its goal is to halve food waste by 2030.
Now that a goal worth pursuing. 4.5 million tonnes of edible food is thrown away each year by UK households and it is costing the average household £700 each year.
This food waste is responsible for nearly 25 million tonnes of CO2 emissions. Even if you are not entirely sure what a tonne of CO2 emissions really looks like, we can all agree that 25 million of them cannot be a good thing.
We need to get back to basics here.
· Plan your menus for the week
· Use those menus to write your shopping list
· Use your leftovers
This final point is not as daunting, or out-of-reach as it may seem. You just need to get into the habit of putting leftovers in appropriate containers, labelled and stored in the fridge or freezer, ready to be eaten cold at a later stage or re-heated. Even small amounts are worth saving as they can be added to another meal. If there’s only one portion of a dish left over, freeze it anyway. At a later date, you will have a meal for one just waiting for you. You rarely eat on your own? No problem, just whip out any meals-for-one you have and give everyone round the table a choice of what to eat. Who cares if everyone is eating something different.
Still not sure how to get started? Help is at hand. You can download the Love Food Hate Waste toolkit here and get all sort of information and tips to help you make your food go further.
https://wrap.org.uk/resources/campaign-assets/love-food-hate-waste-toolkit-make-your-food-go-further
We really need to do this.
Food is a precious resource. We should never be casually binning it.
