What can you do to help prevent food from going to waste?

At FareShare North East we do everything we can to ensure no good food goes to waste, by taking good-to-eat surplus food, and delivering it to our community food members across the region. Lynsey takes us through the facts behind food waste and asks that you share your thoughts on tackling surplus food waste.

Take It Away Lynsey…

Since volunteering at FareShare North East, I have become more and more interested in food waste & surplus food. This has led me to embark on a short course on the subject of food waste and the facts I have found but not only startled me but made me realise that we can all play our part in changing the future. Did you know that we waste ⅓ of the world’s food every year? I was not aware that the problem was so enormous! The learning in this course and further reading truly are shocking, and I’ve included some stats below…

• Each and every one of us throws away 110kg of food per year, this is same weight as a baby elephant!
• The average family with children wastes £700 of food per year
• There are 820 million people on the planet who are undernourished, yet we have 1 billion over fed!
• An area larger than China is used to grow food that is never eaten
• The UK wastes 6.5 million tonnes of food per year, of which 4.5 million is edible…is enough to fill 38 million wheelie bins!
• If food waste were a country it would be the 3rd largest emitter of greenhouse gases
• The top 10 foods that we waste each year after potatoes, bread, milk, meals, fizzy, drinks, fruit juice/smoothies, pork along with ham and bacon, poultry, carrots and processed potatoes.

It’s Not All Doom And Gloom…Times Are Changing

Here’s what you can do to reduce food waste at home, or in other words, reducing your carbon ‘food-print’:

• Try writing a food diary of all your food waste
• Cook dishes and freeze in batches
• Try mashing leftover veg or making it into soups
• Use the green bits from leeks to add to a cheese sauce, chop small and cook for a long time
• Stale bread = croutons!
• Put your potato peels into soups, recommended by Gavin and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has a recipe online too
• Keep your leftovers for lunch, you can always re-use the food to create a new dish
• Chop up your potato peelings and add to a stew to thicken up instead of using flour