News: February 2020

Did you know we throw away the equivalent of 1 in every 5 bags of food shopping? That’s a lot of wasted money, food, packaging and farming!     This adds up to 7 million tonnes a year across the UK, and LoveFoodHateWaste.com tells us that reducing this could save £70 a month for the average family of four – over £800 a year.

Some food ‘culprits’ include milk (mostly because we don’t use it in time), potatoes (170 per household each year), 860,000 apples and 20 million slices of bread every single day. Which items do you tend to waste? Should you buy less, or get creative with ways to use them?

A tip for all that bread is to slice and freeze it, then defrost when you need it. It can be toasted from frozen. For stale bread, grate it (or use a food processor) to make breadcrumbs (which you can freeze), and use these for a crunchy topping on baked fruit, veg, or mac’n’cheese – try adding some herbs, grated cheese and drizzle with vegetable oil or dot with butter. 

Did you try Veganuary? Eating less meat reduces the environmental impact of the food system. On average, we feed 10 calories (as grass or other crops) to animals so they can convert it into just 1 calorie of human-edible food. If this is pasture in upland areas like Swaledale, that’s a good use of land that would be difficult to farm for human-edible crops – but problems arise from using prime growing land for animal feed, or even worse, cutting down rainforests to grow soy and other grains that we then feed to animals.

Making meat a treat, and choosing local, pasture-fed (and ideally organic) meat from happy animals helps reduce your footprint, and support biodiversity and local businesses.