Feature photo by Sarah Chai: Pexels.com
Poor waste management is one of the main contributors to climate change and air pollution and it directly affects many ecosystems and species. Landfills are considered the last resort in the waste hierarchy, but because of the amount of waste we are producing every day, they are very much in use and releasing methane, a very powerful greenhouse gas closely linked to climate change.
In the past, I’ve discussed poor waste management and ways to make a difference from home. However, with Stop Food Waste Day having just gone by, I want to concentrate on this pressing issue. Food waste is a problem that affects us all, so let’s explore why it happens and what we can do to help. Additionally, I’ll highlight some companies and individuals who are making a significant contribution to this cause!
THE ISSUE WITH FOOD WASTE
Food waste is a growing concern worldwide. In fact, according to the US, about one-third of all food produced globally is wasted or lost. This not only impacts the environment, but it is also a social and economic issue: It is estimated that the value of food wasted globally each year is around $1 trillion. When food is wasted, it ends up in landfills where it decomposes and releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.
One of the main causes of food waste is the overproduction of food as supermarkets and restaurants often order more food than they can sell, which leads to excess food being thrown away. Another cause of food waste is the lack of proper storage and transportation facilities. In developing countries, for example, a large amount of food is lost due to poor infrastructure and inadequate storage facilities.
From the cultivation of crops to transportation, sales, storage and ultimately disposal, the food we eat has an impact on the environment and climate. In the UK, agriculture is responsible for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions, 83% of ammonia air pollution, and 16% of water pollution. It is also worth noting that more intensive forms of farming are the leading cause of harm to UK farmland wildlife.
All of this work goes towards producing and having food available and yet, 9.5m tonnes of food is wasted annually in the UK alone.
Our food system plays a big part in climate change, so it makes sense to reduce the amount of food we waste. It is clear that food waste is a complex issue that requires action from individuals, businesses and governments alike. By taking steps to reduce food waste, we can help protect the environment and ensure that everyone has access to the food they need.
Here’s a video made by Oddbox for Cop 26 that tells you more about food waste and its effect on climate change.
CUT FOOD WASTE AT HOME
According to the United Nations, the world’s population is expected to grow from 7.6 billion to 9.8 billion by 2050 – and with it, our food waste is predicted to increase. But reducing waste in your household can be simple if you take into account these recommendations:
Understand the difference between ‘best before’ and ‘use-by’ dates
The difference between best-before and use-by dates is really important. Some foods deteriorate over time in a way that may present a food safety risk. On most packaged food, depending on the product, you will see either a use-by-date, relating to food safety and a best-before-date, relating to food quality.
‘Best Before’ means a product may not taste or perform its best after the specified date, but it is likely safe to use and consume.
‘Use By’ means that a product is highly perishable – products with this label should be consumed by the date listed on the package and disposed of if they weren’t eaten before that date.
In order to reduce your food waste, you should use up, cook or freeze foods that are approaching their use-by date first. For more information about product date labelling, visit the Food & Drink Federation Guidelines here.
Buy local foods that are in season
Foods that are in season are more likely to taste better, which means you’re more likely to eat them!
Food that is in season hasn’t spent as much time in transport from the farm to your plate, so it has had less time to potentially spoil and become waste. Buying locally grown fruit and vegetables also helps support local farms and maintains farmland and open space in your community; also buying local or ordering fruit and veg boxes means no plastic and less packaging.
Have a grocery list and stick to it
Get into the habit of checking what you already have in the fridge and freezer before you go shopping and start planning your meals ahead. By creating a shopping list, you’ll be less likely to stray from the necessities or buy more than you need. Buying more food than you can eat is one of the biggest contributors to food waste at home. This can save you money as well as waste.
Organise your food
Once you bring your food home, you need to know how to store it to maximize its shelf life. Bring older foods to the front of your fridge to make sure it doesn’t get lost or forgotten about in your fridge. If you’ve got a family that likes to grab things out of the fridge independently, but you want them to know what food needs to get eaten first, label it! A simple ‘EAT THIS FIRST’ label could be the difference between throwing a food item out or it being eaten!
You are bound to lose things in your fridge or cupboards if they aren’t organized, by keeping your storage locations clean and orderly, it will allow you to keep track of all your food and hopefully use it productively.
Did you know that the ideal fridge temperature is between 0-5°C, and the average UK fridge temperature is set at least 2°C too warm! Adjusting the temperature of your fridge could help to keep your food fresh for three days longer than usual.
The Love Food Hate Waste® website provides recipes, clear information, advice, and tools, such as the Portion Planner, Food Storage A–Z, and the Chill the Fridge Out temperature checker tool, all of which can make a real difference.
Practice root to leaf eating, also known as root to stalk
Cooking with all the edible parts of a plant is a great way to reduce your food waste at home (and make the most of the money you spend on fresh veggies). Popular ways to eat root to leaf include cooking with cauliflower leaves, broccoli stalks and carrot greens or tops. Here’s a few suggestions:
- Carrot tops are really delicious and they can be made into a pesto or quickly chopped up and added to a salad.
- The peelings of root vegetable such as potatoes, parsnips, carrots and swedes can be baked and turned into crisps.
- The leaves of root brassicas such as swedes and turnips have a delicious mustard flavour which can be stir-fried, whilst the stalks of cabbage might be thinly cut and turned into a slaw or pickled to eat another day.
Leftovers make a perfect new meal
Give a second life to ingredients that most commonly go to waste: you can get creative with what you make from leftover food. Bread is the UK’s most wasted food and 32% of what we bin is perfectly good to eat. From bread puddings to fresh breadcrumbs, saving perfectly good stale bread can really help the planet.
There’s also nothing better than a chunky vegetable soup made out of leftovers from your Sunday lunch. Another great way to minimize the amount of food scraps you throw in the bin is to keep a ‘catch-all’ bowl in your freezer. You can put edible fruit and vegetable scraps into this bowl, and voila – you have the perfect ingredients for a soup base when you need them!
Recycle your food waste and/or get composting
25% of the food items in your bin can potentially be removed from the waste stream if composted. Of course, not all councils have food waste collections in place yet, so, if you can, try composting in your back garden. While composting requires more effort, it’s the most environmentally-friendly way of dealing with kitchen and garden waste, plus it produces compost that can be used as an excellent soil improver.
Use food-saving apps or switch to buying wonky fruit & veg
Many app developers in the past few years have created new ways of connecting people to food that would otherwise go to waste, aiming to reduce the amount of avoidable food waste created.
- Too Good To Go is a free app that boasts 28 million users worldwide, saving more than 100,000 meals daily. It’s B-Corp certified and showcases local food sources such as restaurants, cafes, shops, and bakeries with surplus food that hasn’t been sold in time and would otherwise be wasted. You can also purchase a surprise “magic bag” through the app at a fraction of the retail cost.
- OLIO – ‘the food sharing revolution’ – connects app users to excess home-grown vegetables, food nearing its sell-by date in local shops, and any unwanted food in households. The app is simple to use, with users uploading a picture of their unwanted items and nearby neighbours and other users can receive alerts for new items. Recipients can then arrange to collect the item from a home, an OLIO drop box or another location.
- Winnow aims to connect with the commercial kitchen – big or small, to make it a lot easier to see how much food they are wasting, thereby allowing users to see where they can make savings:
“FOOD WASTE COSTS THE HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY OVER 100 BILLION ANNUALLY. KITCHENS CAN WASTE UP TO 20% OF FOOD PURCHASED, OFTEN EQUIVALENT TO THEIR TOTAL NET PROFITS. THIS IS BECAUSE CHEFS TOO OFTEN LACK THE NECESSARY SKILLS TO ACCURATELY MEASURE AND MANAGE WASTE.”
WINNOW
- The Winnow app allows users to track and weigh the food items that they are throwing away as well as log their reasons for doing so. The app then compiles a report detailing the financial cost of the waste produced over a certain period and how that could be cut down.
- No Waste, unlike other apps that focus on rescuing food from restaurants and shops, concentrates on minimizing household excess. It achieves this by assisting you in managing your purchases, keeping track of expiry dates, and monitoring fridge contents. Additionally, the app will help you prioritize what needs to be used first, thereby reducing unnecessary purchases.
Oddbox rescues food that doesn’t meet retailers’ strict cosmetic specifications, for example it could be an unusual shape or colour, it could be on the smaller size, or it could have been marked in some way while growing.
Often the weather causes more crops to grow than predicted leaving farmers with surplus, which is where oddbox comes in.
They supply boxes of fruit and vegetables and help growers harvest and sell their fruit and veg by being a reliable secondary market.
For details about other food waste apps check out my previous post: About Earth Day.
Donate
It’s a sad reality, but there are many people in our communities who face food insecurity every day. If you have extra food that you know will go to waste if you don’t eat it, it’s a great idea to donate to a local food charity or shelter or use some of the food waste apps to give it away.
You can also find out more about how to reduce your food waste at home on Friends of the Earth here, a super informative platform that aims at giving us all the right resources to protect the natural world and the people living in it.
ZERO FOOD WASTE RESTAURANTS
Whether it’s using cardboard plates, cooking the right fish, or only using wonky vegetables, I’ve rounded up some pioneering London restaurants and cafés that are making big steps towards working sustainably and ethically, making sure there’s as little food waste as possible getting sent to landfills from their venues.
NATIVE
Native: A Restaurant that Prioritises Sustainability and Low Waste. When it comes to restaurants that prioritise low or no waste, Native is a standout. Their unique approach is centred on foraged ingredients, resulting in a hyper-seasonal and low-waste menu.
In fact, they’re so subtle about their ingredient substitutions that you may not even notice! For example, the sea buckthorn margarita features a deciduous shrub that’s easily foraged for and has multiple environmental benefits, such as preventing soil erosion and fixing nitrogen. Another example is their fish trim toast, which creatively repurposes fish offcuts that would otherwise go to waste.
SILO
Silo: A Unique Approach to Cooking and Waste Reduction. Douglas McMaster, the head chef at Silo, has an exceptional talent for reducing waste and transforming cooking into an art form. His ingenious, holistic approach involves using every part of the ingredient, no matter how unusable it may seem.
For example, Parmesan rinds are fermented to create a rich miso paste, and beef trimmings are aged for a year to develop a bold, funky garum. McMaster even goes the extra mile by delivering all ingredients to the restaurant in reusable containers while utilizing upcycled products as much as possible.
SPRING
Spring Restaurant where sustainability is key. Sustainability is a multifaceted concept, and though it seems like common sense, it is not always put into practice. Case in point: Spring Restaurant! This establishment has a unique relationship with biodynamic Fern Verrow Farm, ensuring a farm-to-table approach that is still relatively uncommon. But the restaurant’s commitment goes beyond sourcing.
In 2019, Spring became the first London restaurant to go plastic-free, setting an example for others to follow.
Additionally, diners can opt for the Scratch menu, which makes use of overlooked or discarded ingredients, such as day-old bread transformed into warm bread pudding.
APRICITY
Apricity: The Eco-Friendly Restaurant Taking Sustainability to the Next Level. Chef-owner Chantelle Nicholson’s vision for Apricity is not just to be sustainable, but restorative in nature, where the restaurant operates as a closed-loop of use and reuse. This is a lofty goal that requires a great deal of effort, from foraging for ingredients like nettles and hazelnuts in urban London to designing zero-waste cocktails and incorporating up-cycled and repurposed furniture.
Chef Eve Seemann executes mouth-watering dishes like Cornish mackerel, Shetland mussels with sambal butter and pickled pear, or crispy sprouts with spent-beer vinegar and rosemary. Chantelle manages green energy issues, and waste-minimal menu planning, and deals with hyper-seasonal produce gluts from small producers who practice traditional regenerative farming techniques that nurture diverse, natural landscapes and improve soil health.
MAX LA MANNA
But you don’t have to necessarily eat out to put a stop to your food waste while enjoying a delicious meal. In fact, you can do so at home too!
I am a big fan of Max La Manna, a low-waste chef and digital creator whose casual approach to cooking is just fantastic. He creates simple, affordable dishes that use as much of each ingredient you have at home as possible. His viral, easy-to-follow recipe videos are all over social media and I strongly advise you to give him a follow and maybe even buy one of his low-waste recipe books (I know I have!).
WHAT ELSE CAN WE DO?
That said, it can’t just be up to individuals and businesses to cut down on food waste. Although following the guidelines I highlighted above is something we need to do, the government needs to promote and follow low-waste techniques as well as promote them to individuals and businesses. For example, It should ensure that meals paid for by taxpayers, in places like schools, hospitals and care homes, waste as little food as possible too.
While the UK government has introduced a plastic packaging tax on packaging that contains less than 30% recycled plastic, a ban on microbeads in rinse-off personal care products and measures to restrict the supply of plastic, there are still no restrictions or rules regarding food waste.
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 is to halve food waste by 2030. To achieve this in the UK, further reductions in food waste of 1.8 million tonnes are needed, 1.3 million tonnes from homes and over half a million tonnes from across the supply chain.
If you are interested in supporting Food Waste Action Week in 2024, get in touch with WRAP, the climate action NGO working around the globe to tackle the causes of the climate crisis and give the planet a sustainable future, at [email protected].
