Love Food Hate Waste

Scottish householders throw away a whopping 587,000 tonnes of food away every year.  This is around one third of food bought, essentially throwing away one bag of shopping in every three.  Most of this food could have been eaten with a little more planning and better storage.  Less than one fifth of food waste is truly unavoidable.

Love Food Hate Waste is a nation-wide initiative developed by Waste Aware Scotland, in partnership with the Waste and Resources Action Programme, to encourage the Scottish public to be more waste aware in its attitude to food.  It has the backing of leading Scottish chefs including Nick Nairn, Tom Kitchin, Lady Claire Macdonald and Martin Wishart.

The campaign focuses on four key areas to help reduce food waste – planning and preparation, storing food, recipe ideas and portioning.  The campaign website www.wasteawarelovefood.org.uk offers a collection of hints, tips, recipes and advice from Scotland’s best loved chefs and food writers.  

The main reasons for waste are we cook or prepare too much food and we let our food go past its use-by date or forget we have it.

By having a good look at what you have in your cupboard and then sitting down to plan the week’s meals before setting off to the local store, farmer’s market or supermarket we can make sure to buy only what we need.  Invest in good re-usable storage containers and make sure to check your cupboards regularly and make meals with food from packages that have already been opened first.  
At the supermarket look out for smaller portions of food.  The big bag of carrots may be cheaper, but not if you can’t eat them all before they spoil.  Buy vegetables loose so you eat only what you need.  And don’t be afraid to make something creative with your leftovers.  The Love Food Hate Waste website has great recipes and ideas using leftovers.

Martin Wishart is also urging Scottish householders to reduce food waste by buying seasonally. “Scotland has a fantastic larder of seasonal and local food all year round.  Food tastes so much better when it’s in season.  At this time of year berries in particular are bursting with flavour, really good for you and so versatile.  They’re easy to freeze for another day too.”   

It may seem obvious that the tastiest, freshest food is bought in season, but many of us are entrenched in the convenience of supermarket shopping. Those big hydroponic tomatoes flown in from far away do look gorgeous under the artificial lighting in our favourite fancy supermarket, but do we really need them?  How about taking the kids to your local farmer’s market with a nice basket and having them choose one that smells and tastes fresh....and like a tomato.

You are encouraged to share your recipes, hints and tips on the Love Food Hate Waste website www.wasteawarelovefood.org.uk.

Food makes up nearly 20 per cent of the average household bin.  If we all stopped wasting so much food, we could save around 1.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions – the equivalent of taking one in four cars off the road.