Unacceptable Food Waste
Tesco are reporting that large quantities of good food is thrown away. The story is covered here on the BBC.
The problem isn’t that we waste food, but that supermarkets gear us up to buy large quantities of everything in a weekly shop.
I live in the city and although, I do have a mid-sized Sainsburys in walking distance, I prefer to take a bus to the Angel, when I need food.
I generally food shop two or three days at a time, planning what I need.
I use a lot of multi-use food, like Rachel’s yoghurt, that goes on my muesli and also acts as the sauce for my pasta.
I also buy what I need, like a single onion, three bananas or a ready prepared pack of potatoes. Only last week, I found a sandwich-sized pack of salami in Waitrose.
We need more small packs, so we can buy what we need.
As for salads, which is one of the biggest sources of food waste, I rarely eat them at home, but regularly I will have a salad for my lunch in a convenient Carluccio’s. As an example, their mozzarella fusa, which is a meal in itself, is £6.75. It probably isn’t much more expensive than buying the ingredients in a supermarket and making one myself, if you count the amount of food that will be wasted.
in some ways my biggest food shopping problem, is that I have a small badly-designed kitchen, with a fridge sized for a bed-sit, It doesn’t have a freezer, which is downstairs in my garage. This state of affairs, is because Jerry felt an enormous cooker was what was needed and much more important. I had hoped by now, that the kitchen would have been properly rebuilt.
And of course, I still throw away two much food.
The Anonymous Widower 
That is an interesting point, when supermarkets were first around, there were a lot of households with 4 or 5 children, people had larger families. Now there are lot of single occupant households, who want to buy small amounts of things – Neil and I are usually just the two of us, although we have Helen back at present. We dont throw food away, but we do compost some food. We have a large freezer in the cellar and a small one in the kitchen, and Neil grows a lot of our veg and some fruit. The main thing we buy and eat completely fresh is fruit, and when I buy it, I go to Waitrose because the quality is better than some places, and I get a selection of fruit which includes fruit which needs to be eaten fairly quickly – soft fruits, things labelled “ripe and ready to eat” etc, and then some longer lasting ones – apples, pears, melons etc. And i go once or twice a week to buy it.
Comment by Liz P | October 21, 2013 |