How to... make the most of your food

In North Herts we throw away approximately 9100 tonnes of food from our homes every year. About a third of the food we buy is thrown away - for every three bags of food we buy, one is thrown in the bin.

There are serious environmental and financial implications to throwing food away. During the production, transportation and storage stages of a food’s lifecycle:

RESOURCES get wasted

WATER gets wasted

ENERGY gets wasted

PACKAGING gets wasted

If we all stop wasting food that could have been eaten the CO₂ impact would be the equivalent of taking 1 in 4 cars off the road.

Why does food that is still edible get thrown away?

More than 80% of food waste is avoidable. The main reasons for throwing away food are:

cooking or preparing too much
forgetting to freeze or chill food to use later
a change of dinner plans
forgetting what food is in the cupboards
lacking the knowledge of how to use up leftovers
not using food in time

Check out Love Food Hate Waste This link opens in a new browser window for recipe ideas and tips on how to make the most of your food.

What would you do with £50 a month?

The average family with children wastes around £600 worth of food every year – that’s £50 a month! This could be spent on:

more than 7 cinema tickets or
2 pairs of school shoes or
10 pairs of plimsolls or
1 meal out or
a year’s membership to Whipsnade Zoo!

What can I do?

Before you go food shopping look at the sort of food you end up throwing away and ask yourself why it ends up getting wasted. It might be that you are buying a loaf of bread each week but only getting through half before it goes off. If so, simply freeze half the loaf and use this frozen bread for toasting. Or just buy half loaves!

An amazing 660,000 tonnes of bread is thrown away in the UK each year, of which 82% could have been avoided if it was better stored or the right amount purchased.