Priorities

A report from Which? suggests that as people try to adjust to the current financial situation, healthy food choices are increasingly taking a back seat to price considerations.

You can bet that, if healthy choices are in the back seat, then thoughts about packaging and recycling are in a trailer somewhere, or possibly walking along the hard shoulder, trying to thumb a lift.

I have always had a sneaking suspicion that the idea of healthy food being more expensive is bunkum - but I've never actually checked up on it. Recently I read a forum post from someone who said she bought 5 ready meals for £4 and challenged anyone to buy the ingredients for 5 home-cooked meals (for one) on the same budget. Several people responded, but the only way to get close to 80p a meal seemed to be to buy a £1.99 chicken (is that Hugh Fearnely-Whittingstall I can hear crying?) and some potatoes and veg, to have a roast and then various permutations of curry, etc. Even this didn't quite get down to 5 meals for £4.

This got me thinking about a comment made by Mrs Average last week about taking the waste message to areas where people are on restricted incomes. How do we do it?

This is a really tough one. Should we be trying to bombard everyone with the message at once, when we are already trying to get them to eat healthily in the first place? I am particularly thinking of areas which could be described as food deserts, where you could barely get an apple before, let alone now when even more shops are closing. If the local corner shop has their tiny fruit and veg display with some plastic bags of apples, and potatoes that are all but sprouting already, what do you buy? The messages conflict. Buy fresh food! Avoid excess packaging! Don't let produce go off! In the end it's much easier to reach for a microwave meal and not have to think about it.

Can we treat these areas the same way as others? Is it unrealistic and out of touch for us to swan in to such an area, yapping about making the most of tired tomatoes and not letting the last of the Sunday roast go to waste, if those two foods are not making an appearance anyway? What if your leftovers are two slices of a frozen pizza and the coleslaw that no-one likes from a KFC bucket? Not many LFHW recipes for those. Is the nature and scale of the food waste problem different in deprived areas, and if so, how? The figures are always presented as if we were a homogenous nation, which we aren't, and I imagine we don't create food waste equally either.

If you happen to eat a lot of takeaways and ready meals, are you more likely to bin the leftovers than if you had put the effort in to cook the meal yourself (easy come, easy go)? On the other hand, if you do your best to eke out your weekly food budget, are you more likely to avoid waste than someone with more cash to splash? If the leftover chicken biryani or last slice of the 2-for-1 supermarket pepperoni pizza becomes tomorrow's breakfast because that saves a couple of quid on cereal for the week, that's great for food waste but not so good for a balanced diet - which is the bigger priority? Can we let the healthy eating message take hold first and then come back to food waste - or can we tackle them both together?

I don't mean to be stereotypical. I know for sure that not everyone who lives in a deprived or run down area lives on takeaways and ready meals and I know there are people doing their bit to feed themselves and their families well. There are also more affluent people who also eat a lot of junk food! But what I am saying is that if you already have to make a hell of an effort to find healthy food that you can afford, or even just food you can afford full stop, the idea of food waste and packaging waste probably isn't a big priority, and you are probably not going to be too motivated to do anything about it if you are feeling lectured about it.

Maybe you watched Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food programme, teaching people in the deprived area of Rotherham to cook simple, healthy meals and then share their new skills and enthusiasm with others. That sort of scheme is brilliant - but what an opportunity to also pass on ideas about reducing food waste at the same time. Not making a big thing of it, but casually mentioning keeping fruit and veg scraps for the compost bin, highlighting that a particular recipe works fine with oldish carrots, or suggesting ideas for what you could do with leftovers of this or that recipe. Even ideas on portion sizes would help, to avoid overbuying - when you have never cooked, relating weights of items to what you actually eat is really hard! The point is that healthy eating and food waste are intertwined and perhaps it's best to address them in that way - together.

I'd love to hear other thoughts on this.

LFHW - wrapping it up with soup

So, my week of LFHW blogging comes to an end. This morning I was out on a bike ride, much tougher than expected thanks to the incessant headwind for the first 25 miles, and so I had a bit of emergency refuelling to do. This would not have been the case had I not let us get into the parlous state of having NO CAKE in the house when I left. No cake!! I rectified that this afternoon, making the parsnip cake that horrified Mrs Green with its lack of butter and eggs. I can confirm it is still very much delicious, proved by the fact that I seem to have eaten four pieces. Oops...

So how's our waste total for the last day?

Breakfast: same as Monday, porridge/cereal and tea.
Food-related waste: a teabag.

Lunch: The other half of yesterday's soup, and an individual fondant fancy wedding cake each, from yesterday.
Packaging waste: paper cake case.

Snacks: banana, cereal/fruit/nut bar, bottle of fruit juice, lots of home made cake and tea.
Food-related waste: banana peel, more teabags.
Packaging waste: plastic wrapper, plastic bottle and lid.

Dinner: Roast pork fillet, roast potatoes and parsnips, carrots and peas; stewed rhubarb and yoghurt.
Food-related waste: a few manky bits off the potatoes, parsnip peelings, rhubarb trimmings.
Packaging waste: thin plastic bag from pork.

Compostable food waste: 145g.
No non-compostable food waste.
Recyclable packaging: 2g (cake cases).
Non-recyclable packaging: 45g (plastic bag, wrapper, bottle*).

*sadly I just wasn't able to carry the juice bottle home to recycle, and there was no recycling bin in the village where I bought it, so I've counted it as non-recyclable.

This brings the total for the week to:

Compostable food waste: 1890g
Non-compostable food waste: 433g
Recyclable packaging: 1282g
Non-recyclable packaging: 133g
Grand total: 3738g



So, of all my directly food-related waste, 85% (by weight) has been composted or recycled. I could only make serious inroads on that with something like a bokashi bin (worth it for less than 500g?). I hold my hands up to one "could have been eaten but wasn't" item (the sauerkraut) but overall I think those numbers are not too bad at all. The secret? Just a little bit of forward thinking:

• Plan it! Think about your shopping before you go, and think in terms of meals rather than individual items. Look for links between meals to help you use all of an ingredient if you can't buy exactly how much you want.

• Get friendly with your freezer. Use it to store up whole meals or excess ingredients (if they will freeze), and use it to help you save time and effort through cook-once-eat-twice thinking.

That's my LFHW week over, but the campaign continues, and if you can count on anything at all you can count on there being more low-waste and leftovers recipes appearing on this blog as it continues!

LFHW day 6 - quick and simple

Another night out tonight - it's a friend's wedding and we are off to the reception to join the celebrations. What was a little bit of a dilemma (lots things to do before going out early evening, but we need to eat as we know it's just nibbles tonight) is neatly solved by the second helpings of chicken and chick pea casserole I made the other night. Heated through, it's definitely quick and easy, and will see us through a few glasses of champagne I am sure!

Lunchtime also saw our old friend soup make an appearance. The chicken stock from earlier in the week, plus an onion, carrot, wrinkly potato and the floppy yellow middle bit of the celery; the last of the chorizo and the shreds of meat from the stock bones add a bit of protein, and some parsley from the windowsill adds colour and a bit of freshness. Mop it up with some slightly stale bread from last weekend, and that's a brilliant lunch.

That makes our food related waste stack up as follows:

Breakfast: same as Monday, porridge/cereal and tea.
Food-related waste: a teabag.

Lunch: Soup and bread, fruit, home made flapjack.
Food-related waste: veg peelings, chicken fat and the cooked-out veg from the stock.
Packaging waste: paper bag from the bread, plastic celery wrapper, plastic chorizo tray.

Compostable food waste: 95g (including paper bag).
Non-compostable food waste: 145g (chicken fat and the stock veg it contaminated).
No recyclable packaging.
Non-recyclable packaging: 10g (celery bag, chorizo tray).

LFHWEO

I'm loving food, hating waste, and eating out tonight :) As I don't want to embarrass my friends I shall try to refrain from quizzing the waitress about the restaurant's food waste policies...

Thanks to my inability to get bored by eating the same thing for breakfast (porridge) and lunch (salad) every day, you can work out my food waste habits today from the rest of this week's posts! Home alone, Mark (not invited to the girls' night out...) cooked pasta and tomato sauce and created some further veg trimmings.

Compostable food waste: 320g.
No non-compostable food waste.
No recyclable packaging.
No non-recyclable packaging.

LFHW day 4 - stock it to 'em

An old favourite for tea tonight - chicken, chickpea and lemon casserole. When we bought the chicken from the butcher, rather than four ready-skinned and boned thighs we got two leg quarters. So not only do we have enough meat to make double quantities of the casserole, but I also chucked the bones in with an onion, celery and bay leaves to make yummy stock for the weekend's soup. As I am apparently quite useless at boning chicken, there was plenty of meat left on said bones! So, what might have done us for one meal if we had simply roasted the chicken, has stretched to 3 with the addition of a few extra, cheap ingredients (vegetables).


How about food waste today?

Breakfast: same as Monday, porridge/cereal and tea.
Food-related waste: a teabag.

Lunch: Salad again (but no more manky celery, hurrah), orange, cake. While ferreting in the fridge I found a very old jar of sauerkraut (a phase I went through...) sadly past its best.
Food-related waste: veg peelings and seeds, sauerkraut.
Packaging waste: glass jar and lid.

Snacks: apple, banana, nuts.
Food-related waste: banana peel, apple core.

Dinner: See above!
Food-related waste: leek and broccoli trimmings, lemon pips, onion and garlic skin, chicken bones, skin and fat.
Packaging waste: stock cube foil wrapper, thin plastic bag from chicken.

Compostable food waste: 380g (including 75g sauerkraut!).
Non-compostable food waste: 280g (all from the chicken).
Recyclable packaging: 540g - glass, metal lids, foil.
Non-recyclable packaging: 5g.

LFHW day 3 - the F word

No, not food. And certainly nothing to do with Mr Ramsay. Freezer!

In the campaign against food waste, the freezer is a staunch ally. It takes the rush and repetition out of having leftovers that need using, and lets you take advantage of all those BOGOF bargains to help keep the shopping bills down.

We had a (planned) raid on the freezer tonight. Dinner was a warming sausage casserole (very welcome - it was freezing as I cycled home), with the stars of the show being some rather tasty venison sausages from Pickering's. Now, there are two great things about Pickering's. One, they have an incredible selection of unusual and delicious sausages, and two, they always seem to be doing "buy 2lb get 1lb free" on their Norwich Market stall. (Oh yes - and they wrap them in paper! Make that three great things. I'll have to ask about containers next time...) No matter how much of a banger fiend you are, you'd be pushed to get through 3lb (about 21 sausages) before they went off, so this is where you need your trusty freezer. It would be an absolute crime for these sausages to end up as food waste.

We split the 1lb packs and find that 3-4 sausages squeeze perfectly into a takeaway carton, which stacks nicely in the freezer. Margarine tubs are also OK but they can get brittle when frozen so take care. You can write on the top with a chinagraph pencil to remind you what's inside (you wouldn't want to mix up your Aunt Ednas and your Cornish Tiddlers, would you?) and what date it was frozen. As you can imagine, 6 lots of sausages lasts us a while!

Our freezer holds all sorts of goodies. There are frozen herbs from the summer, lemon juice, bread, home baked cakes for the week, and even grated white chocolate from some previous cooking adventure. In the autumn there were stewed apples ready for making crumble, and I've also done bananas when there has been an end-of-the-day bargain on offer. Sometimes it also holds meals where we've deliberately made double. If I'd thought to get two lots of sausages out to defrost yesterday we could have done that tonight! And the best thing is, your freezer runs most efficiently when it's full. So get filling!

Just time for a quick overview of today on the food waste front:

Breakfast: same as Monday, porridge/cereal and tea. I also found that one of the oranges had gone mouldy in the fruit bowl (only bought on Saturday), so I halved it - ate the good half with breakfast and composted the mouldy one. Tasted fine!
Food-related waste: a teabag, half an orange.
Packaging waste: empty honey jar, seal strip from new one.

Lunch: Back to my usual salad today. Unfortunately the outer stems of the new head of celery are not good - hollow and brown inside. I salvaged the top half of two, and will see what the rest is like tomorrow.
Food-related waste: veg peelings and seeds, 2 half celery sticks.

Snacks: lots of home made cake marking a colleague leaving for 2 months. Due to the cake I didn't eat all my fruit and nuts today :)
Food-related waste: banana peel.

Dinner: See above!
Food-related waste: leek trimmings, green bean tops and tails, garlic skin.
Packaging waste: stock cube foil wrapper, bean tin (plus paper sausage wrapper at the weekend), beer bottle and lid.

Compostable food waste: 340g
No food waste to go in the bin.
Recyclable packaging: 625g - glass, metal lids, tin and foil. Actually the jar and lid will be saved for reuse during jam season!
No non-recyclable packaging.

LFHW day 2

Today's LFHW launch went really well - some supportive launching-type words from Galton Blackiston and people from the council and WRAP, and lots of mingling. I had extremely interesting chats about the Broadland food waste collection trial, ways to improve my compost (air and cardboard is what I need), favourite leftovers recipes, and how this scheme is going to work. I also managed to ask Galton Blackiston about the professional kitchen and food waste, specifically the issue of binning "imperfect" food I blogged before. He was pretty much convinced that the Masterchef example I gave was dramatised to make good TV, and that professional chefs in a real kitchen would not waste food in such a sweeping way. Reassuring to hear! He seems very committed to top quality food from local sources and with a minimum of environmental impact, and having been lucky enough to eat at Morston Hall, I can report that the food quality is not in the least impaired by paying attention to these things!

I also appreciatively collected a cotton shopper bag (yes, another one!) containing goodies such as a fridge thermometer, pasta portion sizer, recipe book and cards, and best of all two Freshpods. These are now lurking in my fruit bowl and salad drawer, guarding against the deterioration of my fruit and veg. The lunch provided was rather tasty, and I just hope that any leftovers were offered around to the event's public visitors! By the time I left, the stalls seemed to be drawing in all sorts of people who were passing through the Forum, for composting advice, food waste freebies, and of course loads of advice, which is excellent.

One of the most interesting discussions I had was actually with another invitee, about how to engage people and what sort of people we reach with these events. He put forward the point that the vast majority of people at the Forum today were middle class, intelligent, and almost certainly already engaged with recycling. Are these the people who are wasting a third of the food they buy? How can we best get through to a wider selection of people - particularly in some of the more deprived areas? We agreed that the best way is to take the information to the people, rather than expecting them to come to you and ask for it, but my personal view is that there is also no harm in starting with an "easy win". That is, talking to the people who are ready to engage and just need information as opposed to persuasion. I always reckon that starting with a bit of success boosts morale and fires you up to go and tackle something a bit more challenging.

All that said, this was just the launch event, and most of the people there, at least initially, were people who had been invited due to the job that they do or the organisation they are with - so that is one reason for it not being an especially varied audience. I am sure there are plans to further develop the LFHW campaign here in Norfolk, and I look forward to seeing what they are! Kudos to the Norfolk Waste Partnership team and WRAP/LFHW guys for a great launch.

How has our food waste day been?

Breakfast: same as yesterday, porridge/cereal and tea.
Food-related waste: a teabag.

Lunch: a couple of sandwiches at the event, with the rest of it later in the afternoon at my desk, consisting of rice cakes, peanut butter, a pepper, a tomato, and an orange.
Food-related waste: pepper stem and seeds, orange peel.
Packaging waste: rice cakes wrapper, paper salt sachet found in my desk drawer.

Snacks: an apple and a banana, some almonds, and a creme egg.
Food-related waste: banana peel, apple core, foil.

Dinner: Chicken stir fry with cabbage, carrot, onion and pepper, sauce and rice.
Food-related waste: cabbage stalk, onion and carrot peel, pepper seeds and stem.
Packaging waste: thin plastic bag from the chicken, empty sauce sachet.

Compostable food waste: 290g
No food waste to go in the bin!
Recyclable packaging: 5g paper and foil
Non-recyclable packaging: 35g plastic

Fridge invaders!

Oh my goodness - there seems to be a strange man rootling around in Alex's fridge!

But it's OK, it's only Wally Webb from BBC Radio Norfolk. He's visiting her to talk about food waste and the big LFHW launch on Norwich today, and to check that she practices what she preaches (I know for a fact she does, so no worries there). I'm sure she'll blog it herself later on, so I just wanted to say well done Alex on being a model zero-food-waster for the county this morning! :)

My perfect waste campaign... LFHW day 1

Well, it's true. I love food, and I hate waste!

As tomorrow sees the launch of the LFHW campaign in Norfolk, and I have been lucky enough to bagsy an invitation, I will have loads of information on reducing food waste coming up on tomorrow's blog.

I have also decided that this will be my own LFHW week, and I'll tally the waste we create with particular attention to food. First it's worth saying a bit about the start of the week, which in food terms is the weekend as that's when we shop.

On Saturday morning I sat and planned the food for the week - a mix of old favourites (stir fry, tomato and bacon pasta) and new recipes to try (white fish with spicy beans and chorizo, sausage and butter bean casserole), plus any baking I want to do. This gets translated into a list and we go out shopping - to the greengrocer, fishmonger, baker (all the same shop!), butcher, and then to the supermarket for tinned and dry goods and non-food. Using the list, we should find that we don't overbuy - buying things loose from independent shops also helps with this. Over the weekend I baked banana flapjacks with some almost-past-it nanas, and made a big pan of vegetable and pasta soup to do for lunch both days.

On to today, the start of my LFHW focus, and it went something like this:

Breakfast: porridge with fruit, nuts and honey, and a fruit tea. For hubby it's weetabix.
Food-related waste: a teabag.

Lunch: I have a big salad with spinach, cucumber, celery, pepper, carrot, cherry tomatoes, tuna, and sweet chilli sauce, followed by an orange and one of the fruity oat bars I baked last week (packed in a reusable tub). Him indoors doesn't do packed lunches, not that I haven't tried! It's usually a supermarket sandwich, yogurt and fruit, but today he was at a meeting with lunch included.
Food-related waste: inedible vegetable and fruit bits (peels, cores, seeds, etc.)
Packaging waste: celery wrapper.

Snacks: an apple and a banana, and some nuts (a small pot, filled from a big pack at home). Mark manages to munch some cake.
Food-related waste: banana peel, apple core.
Packaging waste: empty almond bag.

Dinner: haddock fillet with spicy beans, chorizo and cabbage, crusty bread, then yogurt and some flapjack. Clean plates all round apart from the scaly haddock skin!
Food-related waste: tough ribs from the cabbage's outer leaves, onion and garlic peel, fish skin.
Packaging waste: tomato and bean tins, plastic yogurt pot and lid, thin plastic bag from the fish, foil yogurt lid.

As you can see, there is plenty of "unavoidable food waste" (i.e. non-edible bits), but the vast majority of this (320g) can be composted. Just the fish skin (8g) has to go in the bin. Of the packaging, the tins and foil (110g) can be recycled, but the plastics (38g) can't.


One thing I do know is that there will be less compostable waste for me tomorrow as the launch event includes a buffet (suitably low-waste I hope...)