| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| jocorless |
that we waste 3.6m tonnes of food a yearhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7389351.stmFinally it appears that the media have latched on to something we've all known for ages - that the waste of food is unbelievable - Hopefully this means that it will now become fashionable to make use of leftovers |
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| Bernie66 |
I might become all trendy 
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| Brownbear |
I've got some funny-looking bacon left in an old bit of greaseproof paper I found at the back of the fridge. Perhaps I'll send it to Madonna - she's always up with the latest trends. It's a bit green and curled up at the edges, but I doubt it would stink any worse than Washed Away. | ||||
| Rob R |
Re: that we waste 3.6 tonnes of food a year
Actually, I don't find it that unbelieveable. I'm in a lucky position to know the value of good food, when I see what most people survive on, even in a 'rich' society, I would quite happily waste a lot of it, what I live on is good, so I don't want to waste it. We (in Britain) seem quick to blame China for using so much wheat that the price has shot up, but in reality all they are doing is aspiring to be like us, wasteful-westerners. 
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| twoscoops |
A woman on the Today programme this morning was talking about throwing out some mint sauce and some parmesan that were a few weeks old. It appears that she is unaware that mint sauce is a preserve and that parmesan is well over a year old when you buy it. I think education is the key. | ||||
| Bernie66 |
I think alot of it stems from not paying enough for food. If you get a chicken for £1.99 then you don't value it how food should be valued. If we paid an "honest " price for food then maybe people would not waste it. | ||||
| Rob R |
Price and availability- food is so accessible to most people in this country that they don't even think about saving it. | ||||
| gnome |
i cant bear to see food go to waste (you know that Jo), as we were always hungry when i was a child, and taught to believe that it is a terrible sin to leave anything on your plate. even potato peelings and carrot tops were put into the compost bin. i still do that now. our local council refuses to even consider collecting food waste, so it is just let to individuals. they collect garden waste, but we are not permitted to contaminate that with food leftovers.
a big reason for too much food waste is partly because people (mostly children) are just too fussy these days, and it is considered to be very very bad to harass your child into eating something they dont want. PC gone mad. another reason is people dont cook proper meals. i started an idea called the Campaign for Real Food a few years ago to try to encourage people to prepare and cook meals rather than eat fast food or ready prepared microwave meals - but it fell on deaf ears. one of the mainstays of english cooking is the numerous good meals that were made from leftovers. there was usually enough food leftover from a Sunday roast to make a meal for 4 on Monday - a casserole, a curry, a pie - whatever. for instance, on Bank Holiday i put Sunday's leftover chicken into a dish with a few olives, some mushrooms, a big dollop of peanut butter, a spoon of honey, and a bit of tomato puree - baked it for a while, and produced a really delicious meal that was nicer than the original roast. |
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| Bernie66 |
More eloquently put than I, but the same thing as I meant. | ||||
| orangepippin |
In the good old days people had the time to make full use of food - a quick skim read of Lark Rise to Candleford (the book not the TV series) will show that. Even when I grew up the Sunday dinner was still being recycled on the Wednesday. Unfortunately these days pressure of time means that some waste is inevitable. | ||||
| Bernie66 |
Up to a point yes, but free time is spent watching TV or the pub etc etc. Should one go to the pub rather than make a pie out of the leftover chicken? | ||||
| JB |
I heard this on the Today programme this morning and while I agreed with everything the interviewee was saying I couldn't help but think that she sounded a little bit too WI, a little bit too "dig for victory" to convince many 21st century people. I think we'd need to get more Hugh Fearnleys and Jamie O's cooking with left overs to make people think it's actually possible. Perhaps the Beeb should have a daily cookery programme where each day's meal is made from the left overs from the previous days? | ||||
| Bernie66 |
It's a matter of priorities in your life, values and priorities.
"We've never had it so good" |
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| Rob R |
And also, strangely enough, there are still 24 hours in every single day... 
Priorities shift & these things sneak up on people, before they realise it.
Edit: snap! 
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| gil |
One should make a pie whilst drinking homebrew. Win-win. |
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| Bernie66 |
Clearly you are correct, I apologise for my ommision.
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| sean |
Or you could lead by example and make a pie out of leftover chicken in the pub. I'm sure people would have lots of questions for you while you were doing so. |
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| Bernie66 |
And then people could bring their leftovers in to the pub for you, sorted. Job done. | ||||
| twoscoops |
If I'm allowed to raise a point about Jamie and Hugh's programmes earlier this year (no doubt they were discussed in great detail) I found that they failed to tackle the issue of cost of food well enough. It's fine for Hugh to tell people that they can get three or four meals out of a free-range chicken, but they can get the same amount of meals from a battery hen. What disappointed me was that Hugh could easily have demonstrated that protein need not come from meat but could just as easily come from pulses. If people say that thier children won't eat pulses then the issue is about choice, not about cost. |
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| gil |
The marble-topped pub tables would be ideal for rolling out the pastry. |
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| cab |
Re: that we waste 3.6 tonnes of food a year
The media attention today is due to a new report based on the contents of peoples bins. Not unreasonable for them to report it, and no bad thing to bring some publicity to this. Dreadful waste. |
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| cab |
Couldn't agree more. Sometimes we'll get 12 portions from a chicken, other times we'll get 4, splurging on meat for a couple of days. The amount of meat we eat is probably similar whichever way we'll eat the bird because the rest of the time we probably won't have any. The message 'don't eat meat with every meal' hasn't been put forward through such programs at all. |
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| Rob R |
It's a good point, worth mentioning, even if it hadn't switched as many people over to free range, it would have helped reduce the number of poor birds having to live indoors all their lives. Edit: might have been better from a PR point of view too, would certainly have removed the justification for anyone claiming he was just out to increase his own free range sales. Have to say the campaign is still not over though & it's probably worth mentioning to them directly: www.chickenout.tv |
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| gnome |
lack of time is just a very weak excuse - most people have plenty of time to cook, they just dont want to bother. leftover in particular are not time consuming meals - they have already been prepared and cooked once - they just need mixing with new ingrediants and heating up. it doesn't take long to throw a few things into a wok. i can understand why most young people don't like making pies - you have to make pastry, and get that messy doughy mixture all over your hands and they dont like getting sticky fingers. that's our generation's fault for not encouraging them to play in mud when they were kids.
part of the problem with leftovers being wasted is all the food scares, public information films, and plain basic scare mongering that has given a whole generation the belief that once a cooked meal has gone cold, it is a breeding ground for life threatening bugs that has rendered the food a dangerous health risk. |
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| Rob R |
Agree with that. We now expect food to be much more durable now too, hence all the E-numbers; nature used to tell us when our food was going off, not it's hidden behind these preservatives & colourants.
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| Rosemary Judy |
There was a woman in the paper Mr RJ bought on Friday who wasted £34 worth of food a week.......
that is a HUGE amount of money, never mind food......... ( and I am feeling guility for throwing out a soup spoon worth of tinned salamon I forgot to put in a sandwich last week. Even the cats said 'no'  )
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| Rob R |
That could be just the scrapings from the caviar tin though.
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| cab |
I'll confess that I think nothing of the food we waste. But mostly its home grown food that we waste; if I end up with too many leeks (as we did this spring) I'll give some away, but I don't consider composting the rest to be 'waste' as such.
To a great extent I think that the waste problem isn't about the food itself, its the inputs required to get that food to someone. The waste in producing, harvesting, packing, storing, selling, etc. Obviously, if you're putting work in to producing your own food you feel compelled to waste less, but still, if you do waste some, its generally less important. |
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| gnome |
a lot of food used to be wasted in the old days because trying to produce just enough to meet requirements or to fullfill market needs was impossible. you could never be sure of the weather, so it was never possible to know how much of what you sow would be a usable crop. also, it was a struggle to get the harvest in intime before it ruined in the field.
people wasted less food personally, but todays food is able to last longer - either because it is genetically modified to resist rotting more, or because much of it is processes and preserved, or because we are able to get it out of the ground and into supermarkets quicker. it's on a personal level we are wasteful - precisely because we are more secure in knowing where the next meal is coming from, and take it for granted. but the lack of cooking lessons has created a whole generation that dont know what to do with food. sure - if that tin is still half full of beans, we could have them later, or we could warm up those mashed potatoes - but who wants the same meal for supper as we had for tea? we have to teach young people how to be imaginative and to make something diferent from their leftovers. |
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| Beki |
Couldn't agree more with everything said!
I try not to waste anything, but i don't always succeed. I'm growing a lot of my own veg this year, and if i get a glut (as i reckon i will with 15 courgette plants  ) i'll simply give away some, and freeze the rest. The things that don't freeze well (like courgettes i've heard) will be cooked into meals and THEN frozen.
It makes me cringe to think of the amount of food we, as a nation, waste when there are so many people who would kill for our leftovers
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| gnome |
our country has very fertile land - we could easily produce all the food we need for ourselves and other countries if we tried. the dificulty is in transporting it to where it is needed most. when are those lazy scientists going to get off their backsides and invent us a teleporter? | ||||
| Rob R |
Only about 20 years ago...
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| Trev |
Very droll...
The trouble is that here we're all preaching to the converted - I always buy the Sunday meat with an eye to having leftovers for Monday's tea. I always boil the chicken carcass to make stock (and, someday, soup) and save the leftover gravy & veg (with a little sacrificed to the wormery). I try to grow my own to fulfil my needs etc etc etc… I look to this site & you folks for ideas on how to alter my life for the better of all while maintaining the level of comfort I greedily enjoy & jealously guard. It is good that such “news” is highlighted to those that are not “converted” in the hope that some will think more about their actions and may even act upon it. One can hope that this will all become part of the trendy new wave of Green, having shed the tree-hugging hippy image to become, not just socially acceptable, but social one-upmanship. The backing & exampling by the celebrity chef brigade would help, if only Delia would stop bucking the trend. A return of cookery to the classroom, grow you own & household frugality, but without the WI “Dig for Victory” overtones… not to defame the stalwart WI, of course. We can pass on such values to our children, but how can we spread the word without appearing evangelical or overly fanatical? |
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| gnome |
we have to preach to the converted - the rest won't listen to us. |
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| tahir |
Just normal interaction, anybody that comes to ours knows taht we grow our own veg, a couple of families in the village have started growing their own since they've seen our plot. |
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| Rob R |
'Tis true, and talking to people on Downsizer is not necessarily 'preaching to the converted', some who read this are far from converted. Most tend to come looking for one thing & end up leaving (or never leaving) with much more. |
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| Behemoth |
Yeah, I turned up to abuse NL and ended up with half a sheep of yours in the freezer.
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| gnome |
they should put repeat episodes of "The Good Life" on the school curriculum. honestly, that show really fired my imagination and inspired me. | ||||
| Rob R |
Pigs in the Playground inspired me. | ||||
| sean |
Pogles' Wood here, hence the drinking and fiddle playing. |