It’s Food Waste Action Week
Where to start, first of why does it matter – so many stats so little time but here a few of my favourites ..
- The UK throws away around 9.5 million tonnes of food waste every year
- The UK’s total food waste could feed roughly 30 million people a year
- The consumable food we waste costs the UK about £19 billion
- Households are responsible for 70% of the UK’s food waste, with each person in a household wasting around 70kg annually.
- If UK households avoided wasting food for just one day, it would have the same environmental benefit as planting 500,000 trees. (Are you serious reduced food waste by just one day has that big an impact!!)*
It’s pretty clear that reducing your food waste is one really easy way of reducing your environmental impact and saving yourself money.
There’s lots of really good advice about how to reduce your food waste, but it never is quite as easy as it seems – I mean none of us (I hope) ever buy food knowing we aren’t going to use it but life happens – that reduced pack of spinach seemed like such a good deal (mental note to self use – spinach in fridge**), an unexpected event or working late means no time to cook.
So my first tip would be to do an audit (sounds dull right well that’s life you have to do some dull stuff) – keep a track of everything you put in your food waste bin (or rubbish if you don’t have a food waste bin), keep a piece of paper and a pen handy and write it down. This will tell you two things – firstly how much is actually going in there and secondly what sort of thing. Is it meals that you’ve made too much of, is it bread that’s gone mouldy or potatoes (apparently bread and potatoes are the most thrown away thing). Once you know what it is you know where to start.
My second tip would be to think about storage, I am guilty of getting back from the shops and stuffing everything into the fridge or cupboard without necessarily thinking about it. Could that loaf of bread go straight in the freezer, should that pack of yogurts go to the back so that the oldest ones get used first. Potatoes need a cool dark space – not next to onions apparently (which is annoying cos I keep my potatoes and onions in the same place). I have a container in my fridge which I put the stuff that needs using up first or you could have a shelf – if you have forgetful people in your household – label it ‘USE FIRST’ simple but surprisingly effective.
Do you have a freezer? If so you have an amazing food waste prevention system right there – I’m not going to tell you what to freeze (lets face it I’m the sort of person who puts stuff in their freezer without a label and says I’ll remember what is!) but you can get a comprehensive list at Love Food Hate Waste or check out The Full Freezer for a how to freeze stuff so you can use it easily and also some amazing tips on how to defrost and organize your freezer (which I fully admit I started but didn’t finish but it was still great) Link to the The Full Freezer.
Then there’s also understanding labels – use by, best before – basically use by dates are about safety and best before dates are about quality more info at Food Standards Agency Best before and use-by dates | Food Standards Agency there’s even a video with a little jaunty tune.
After that it’s about making things work for you, take leftovers for example, in my house my husband will eat pretty much anything, so any leftovers will be eaten by him for lunch the next day (to the extent I have put away label anything I don’t want him to use – I also have to hide nuts and dried fruit from him but that’s another issue!) But I know lots of people aren’t so keen and yes you can make something new from them (my mum’s potato cakes are a reason to have leftover mashed potato) but if that’s not your thing maybe try not to have leftovers in the first place – think about why, portion size is a great thing get to know how much you and/or your family eat. I’ve made recipes that say serve 4 but in reality it could serve a family of 4 for a week (I exaggerate but you know what I mean). I always measure things like pasta and rice and be realistic.
Making a list before you go shopping is a no brainer for me, even though yes I regularly forget to take the list with me and yes I regularly buy extra things that aren’t on the list (hello bag of reduced spinach), sometimes I’ve even been known to write really useful things on the list like ‘dinner’. It does though give me a starting point and makes me stop and think so I know how many meals I need to buy for, do we really need bread etc. rather than picking stuff up randomly (which can save you money as well).
Meal planning – I used to be a great meal planner with small children I would plan a week’s worth of meals do one big shop – job done. Now I admit I struggle to plan more than 2 or 3 days ahead and to take this week as an example so far we’ve had pasta with random vegetables and rice with random vegetables – when I’m asked what’s for dinner on Friday it is (nearly) always pie (it rhymes – pie day) and quite often it is ‘leftover vegetables I found in the fridge pie’. Fortunately I have mainly trained my family (my son’s not always convinced!) to eat my sometimes random collection of ingredients on a plate that I call dinner. If that is not you and you have a more complicated life than mine you might prefer to plan, or at least think about ways you can keep ingredients ready to throw together without waste (PS The Full Freezer method is great for that)
Would be great to hear your favourite food saving tips.
Love Julia (your friendly eco geek)
*Food Waste Statistics for 2025 – Waste Direct UK
** don’t worry the reduced bag of spinach got used up in a random veg and macaroni cheese and there were only a few leaves that had gone a bit slimy!
