Reducing food waste

Here are the ideas that came out of the CAEL How to reduce food waste meet-up on 26 August 2019:

Underlying principles

  • Think and be mindful

  • Not to over consume: not buy more than needed and keep portion sizes reasonable

  • Planning

  • Freeze, freeze, freeze! (left-overs, batch cooking, food that would otherwise go off)

Tips shared

  • Think about situations where food waste happens more commonly e.g. over buying when guests are visiting

  • Meal plan for the week ahead

  • Best before vs Use by dates

  • Batch cooking and freezing (saves energy too)

  • Use up what you have in the fridge before stocking again

  • Have a budget and stick to it – prevents over buying

  • Measure what you cook e.g rice, pasta

  • Use no more than 6 ingredients in a meal – keep it simple and then you don’t end up with exotic ingredients that you can’t use in other meals

  • Make left-overs or scraps into soup

  • Keep chickens and feed them left over food

  • What foods are worse to waste? E.g. wasting meat is worse than wasting home grown veg

  • Support and buy imperfect food e.g. the ‘wonky’ section at Morrisons

Specific tips for foods

  • Bread: only buy when it’s really needed (bread used up), freeze what’s not needed. Turn excess bread into croutons, breadcrumbs

  • Chicken bones: made into soup

  • Herbs: chop up and put into ice cube trays with some water and freeze

  • Coffee grounds can be used on heather to help it grow

  • Gooseberries, damsons, rhubarb can be frozen in chunks and then put into drinks as ‘ice cubes’

  • Bananas: make into ice cream – freeze and then whiz up with natural yoghurt

Ideas for saving food in wider community

  • Excess food, particularly excess produce during growing season – make available for the wider community to use. Ask the Mart if they would be interested in this (Sue to ask), if not can look into possibility of having a table outside community hall or a café. Encourage folk providing the food to add simple recipes so that people have ideas of how to use the food

  • Excess food could be provided to cafes/ Bostock bakery etc to use (? – would need to be investigated) Access to an apple pressing machine? E.g. Dunbar micro-brewery?

  • Set up simple cookery courses with a focus on how to use typical food which is wasted

Download the food waste ideas as a PDF here.