5 Ways to Cut Down on Food Waste in the Home



Disclaimer: Article written with Bristol residents in mind; doesn't mean these tips don't apply wherever you are though!

Food waste accounts for 7 million tonnes of all waste created in the UK annually. Unlike other forms of waste, food waste has the potential to be easily diverted from landfill,  avoiding continued overfilling of landfills, pollution of the environment, and emissions from the transportation, industry and uncontrolled decomposition of this waste, not to mention the wasted man hours, soil nutrients, water, and additional costs needed to create any and all food.



Grow your own vegetables

By growing your own vegetables you can be in control of everything that will go into them, and eventually your mouth. Asides from the taste and health benefits, you’ll be more wary of wasting the results of your hard work rather than easily accessible supermarket produce; you won’t have to purchase as much produce as well, and so will save money in the long run. You’ll also be cutting down on your carbon footprint by eating seasonal veg rather than food that has to be imported out of season. You can also save your food from over-ripening or going off as it will be ready to eat straight from the plant, as and when you feel like it! If you don’t have a garden for growing, there are plenty of allotments in every nook & cranny of Bristol, and many community gardens to boot!


Get preserving

Humans have been preserving food in a multitude of ways probably since the dawn of agriculture: cooking, smoking, drying, cooling, pickling, dry-storing and fermenting are just some of the multitudes of ways people have found to save their food for longer, and save it from going to waste. With modern inventions such as fridges and freezers, there’s almost no excuse to not have a go at pro-longing the life of offcuts and leftovers.




Compost food waste

If you decide to follow the above, this second tip will help out. Compost your food waste in a garden or allotment to create nutrient rich additive for growing plants. Basically everything apart from meat and dairy, which need special treatment and may attract pests, can be safely decomposed at home to create compost or mulch. Many councils including Bristol City are starting to collect food waste separately to anaerobically digest to create compost, and are seeing huge savings in waste going to landfill and also profits from selling the resulting compost.

Get to know when food is really off

Chances are that if you throw something away by it’s sell-by date, you are throwing away food that had a few days or even weeks left to be used by. Sell-by-dates are often put on food to avoid any suing or food poisoning risks, but they’re often fairly arbitrary. Many foods don’t even need one- honey and salt don’t go off, but can change form. Get to know the signs for a food going off using your senses- does it feel, look, smell, or taste (only try a teeny bit if you’re really unsure!) like it should? If not, chances are it is off.  If fruits like bananas or apples aren’t mouldy or rotten, but are overripe, there are many imaginative ways to use them up, like in smoothies or in cakes. More extreme acts would involve rescuing food from supermarket bins, often called ‘dumpster diving’ or ‘freeganing.’

Prepare your own meals

When you are cooking at home you can monitor and deal with your waste in as environmentally friendly a way as you want, whereas if you purchase ready made meals and takeaways, you lose this control. Do you really need to get rid of those peels? Can they be kept on? Can they be cooked differently? You can make decisions in the kitchen that will affect how much food waste you make. Many processing facilities will waste a lot of food as they are required to speedily make many items such as sandwiches to a quota. More obviously, avoiding purchasing ready made meals will also save you on plastic and other waste.

Many of these are only really applicable in your home- if you’re in Bristol, you can learn more and get to grips with your food waste by getting in touch with with organisations like Foodcycle or attending events such as those run by Feedback. Ecojam handily has many volunteering oppurtunities collected on their website, including roles related to food waste.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

European Rewilding for More than the Wealthy

Image
Longhorn Cattle Grazing at Knepp Estate, West Sussex, 2017 (Photo Author's Own)             Rewilding at its core is letting nature ‘get on with it.’ Much conservation & land management involves a huge amount of human meddling and intrusion and tends to maintain a ‘wilderness’ that is merely traditionally and aesthetically accepted. Nature has all of the necessary components in-built, but humans have altered these workings to the point that certain essential species have become extinct or extirpated (total removal of a species from an area) from countries that now have an impoverished wilderness. If we reintroduce some of these species we could spark a chain reaction that enriches wildlands. The most heavily cited success is the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1994. (Farquhar) The wolves keep deer numbers in check by hunting the slowest and weakest of the herd, and keep them on t...
Read more

Opting out: on not eating meat

Image
It’s only been two years since I became a vegetarian, and for me it was very easy; although I ate meat, I never saw it as very important, and my upbringing didn’t hinge much cultural importance to it. As I began cooking more I began eating meat less, which was expensive and not always easily storable or usable, and fairly often bland. My partner has been a vegetarian most of her life so it made a lot of sense to just slip into it and stop eating meat in the winter of 2016.             The breaking point for me was a few lines and descriptions in J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, which I was studying at the time as part of my Literature undergraduate degree. Through the titular character, Coetzee elaborates that meat producing systems are factories of death, emerging from the Chicago slaughtering pits of the early 20 th century that specialised in toning the efficiency of killing, where men spent their working hours clubbing...
Read more

Best Nature Writing I Read in 2018

Image
Since finishing up at university, i've read a lot less nature writing. The books on this list are books that I read in my first year out of study, after finishing my Master's in Environment, Development & Policy at the University of Sussex. Aldo Leopold- A Sand County Almanac After using small excerpts and recycled quotes from Leopold throughout my Masters, I finally sat to read the full collection of his writings, which range from still-life journals to reflections on pinnacle realizations and moments in Leopolds career, including looking back at the senseless extirpation of wolves from Yellowstone which he was a part of, and advocating for their return. Masanobu Fukuoka- Sowing Seeds in the Desert: Natural Farming, Global Restoration, and Ultimate Food Security. This may be Fukuoka's later work, but it shows a full lifetime's introspection and attention to nature, snowballing into a heavy hitting look at the possibilities for a harmonious relati...
Read more