Living Greener: Practical tips to reduce food waste

SEVERAL years ago, a study found that up to a third of all food sold was thrown away uneaten – inexcusable in a country where farmers struggle and children go hungry.

That country was the United Kingdom, which has a generally good record of conserving its resources, so pundits wondered what a global study would find.

Such a study was released later – by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, somewhat surprisingly – and their findings revised the figure upwards.

The IME report found that ‘30-50 per cent (or 1.2-2 billion tonnes) of all food produced never reaches a human stomach’ across rich and poor countries alike.

The reasons varied, however; poorer countries had less money and technology to harvest and store food properly, while countries like ours waste food mostly through ‘retail and consumer behaviour’.

The retail part accounts for a third of all crops brought to stores. 

The report said, when ‘supermarkets, in meeting consumer expectations, will often reject entire crops of perfectly edible fruit and vegetables at the farm because they do not meet exacting marketing standards for their physical characteristics, such as size and appearance’.

Once the food is on the store shelves, ‘commonly used sales promotions frequently encourage customers to purchase excessive quantities which, in the case of perishable foodstuffs, inevitably generate wastage in the home. 

Overall, between 30 percent and 50 percent of what has been bought in developed countries is thrown away by the purchaser.’ 

That’s up to 50 per cent in our homes on top of the 30 per cent at the store – up to 80 per cent overall. 

Such depressing findings studies do have a glass-half-full side.

However, we could cure world hunger right now with what we already have.

The first way to cut food waste, obviously, is to use as much as possible, whether store-bought or from your garden.

If you have extra fruit or berries, or find they are a bit too ripe, make them into jam to preserve vitamins over the winter.

Freeze them to use later as pie filling.

Mash and dry them into fruit leathers for snacks over the next few weeks.

Pile the fruit and berries into a jar to the rim, pour spirits like vodka or poitín over them, and make liqueur.

If you have too many leftover peas, dry them by the closetful for pea soup over the winter.

If you have too many courgettes, incorporate them into bread, cakes, casserole, soups, stir-fry, sandwiches, frittatas, moussaka, tarts and latkes.

If you are overloaded with herbs, cut them at the base, hang them upside-down in the closet or greenhouse to dry, and use them over the rest of the year for flavourings or tea.

Alternately, mash basil and other herbs with pine nuts and olive oil to make pesto.

Most of all, remember my favourite weapon in the fight against home food waste: quiche. This fancy-sounding French dish – typically cooked vegetables covered in cheese and eggs and cooked like a pie – works well to disguise any number of leftovers.

Raw vegetable waste unsuited for human consumption – carrot tops, coffee grounds, peelings and woody stalks – need a compost bin. 

If you don’t already have one, start working on it now or ask permission to use an inconspicuous corner of someone else’s yard. 

Compost turns your waste back into soil that you can put back in the garden after a year or two, soil rich in the kind of nutrients that might otherwise require chemical fertilisers.

The most basic kind of compost is for raw vegetable waste – things like animal waste or mulch need a separate bin and need to “cook” for longer.

Don’t put meat, cooked food, fat or eggshells in, as they could attract vermin. Don’t put too much that would be poisonous, like potato leaves – farmers around us pile up the potato leaves to dry and then burn the dried pile in spring.

For things that don’t go in regular vegetable compost, there are few kitchen disposal units better than chickens.

They eat both meat and vegetables, cooked and uncooked, and they don’t care if the rolls are a day old or the carrot slices have gone woody, and they will readily turn all your waste back into protein again. 

Consider hot composting, which I have written about before.

With measures like these, most of us could reduce our waste to almost zero in a short time and solve multiple problems with a single solution.