Sustainable practices, food waste, and issues of packaging are complex. It’s important we find realistic solutions to the issue of food wastage and packaging.
Read the following practical tips to find out how you can avoid throwing away surplus food and leftovers and get to run a more economical household.
Where Food Is Wasted
- Food that goes off during transportation
- Discoloured, marked, misshapen, or oddly sized vegetables and fruits that do not meet the standards of the market and about 40% are thrown away before they are even carried away from the farm.
- Foods past their due dates or offcuts are binned by consumers as well as retailers.
- Cooked food is binned.
Waste Less Food
Below are ways to ensure we waste less food.
- Eat foods of all sizes and shapes – ‘ugly’ vegetables and fruits are sold by box schemes such as the London-based Oddbox that also gives the food surplus to the food banks through the City Harvest.
- Companies use ‘ugly’ vegetables and fruit in their products – defective vegetables and fruits are used in snacks, hummus, chutneys, jams, and drinks by companies like Dash Water, ChicP, Snact, Waste Not, Rubies in the Rubble, and more.
- Use it to make other related resources
Ways To Reduce Food Waste
- Use the freezer –You can use the weekends to batch cook and then freeze the extra food.
- Go to the local grocer – They’ll have lots of good advice on how to use the leftover veggies.
- Plan ahead – You should carefully consider what you’ll be cooking and how to use these leftovers.
- Carefully check the use-by date of the fresh food after buying it – The use-by dates are important to consider instead of the best before dates. You should only buy food that you can use before expiration.
- Do not over-buy – You should carefully keep track of whatever you have purchased and used.
Bottom Line
There are many ways to address the important key food waste points. In developing countries improving infrastructure for transportation, processing and storage is essential. However, in developed countries such as the UK, major interventions are vital at the consumer and retail levels.
References
Tips to reduce food waste. (2019, November 15). U.S. Food and Drug Administration. https://www.fda.gov/food/consumers/tips-reduce-food-waste
Gill, V. (2021, March 4). Food waste: Amount thrown away totals 900 million tonnes. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56271385