Food Waste

According to Love Food Hate Waste, an average family of four could save £40 by planning and serving the correct portion sizes and using up any leftovers. Not only will this save you money you will reduce food waste going into landfill.

Wasting good food is avoidable. Sometimes food waste is unavoidable. Dealing with food waste such as peelings and bones is important. Food waste should not be put into landfill as it does not breakdown the same way as it would with composting and produces methane.

Try these tips to reduce your waste:

Don't throw away vegetables that are overripe or wilting you can change what you do with them. Try making soup, or blend for sauces. Use vegetable peelings for stock.

Clean potato and other vegetable peelings can be baked in the oven and eaten as crisps.

The BBE Best Before End is the date the product or produce will be at its best. You can tell by the look and smell if you can still eat it.

Refresh celery and cucumber by standing it stem end down in a jar or glass of water in the fridge.

Use as much of the vegetable as you can. Cauliflower and broccoli stalks are the best bits!

Find new recipes for leftovers. There are plenty of sites to help.

Grow your own food, you are less likely to waste food as you know the time and effort involved to grow it. If you grow 'cut and come again' salad leaves you can just pick the amount you need. You'll never find a squashed bag of salad leaves in the fridge drawer again!

Freeze food leftovers, a lot of things will freeze. Sometimes you loose the texture such as courgettes but added to a pasta you don't really notice.

Buy frozen vegetables you will reduce waste by only using what you need each time.

Regrow food from leftovers, carrots won't regrow but you can use the carrot slice at the top to grow carrot greens. These can be used like parsley or made into pesto. See the section on Regrowing

Milk freezes well you can also make sauces in bulk and freeze to make a recipe such as lasagna later. If you make plant milk you can make the amount you need when you need it. Most plant milks keep well in the fridge although you do need to shake before you use them as they do have a tendency to separate.

If you don't manage to eat a loaf before it goes off then freeze the bread and get our slices as you need them.

Think carefully before you grab a bargain. Can you really use that much? Do you know if you can freeze it?

Buying in bulk needs consideration. Prices are cheaper, there is less packaging but can you actually eat that many sunflower seeds? (The answer is actually yes because you can make 'cheese' and milk from them!)

We produce very little food waste and now don't throw any food waste away as everything will either go on the compost heap at the allotment, in the wormery or in the bokashi bin. See Bokashi, Composting, and Vermiculture pages.