Food waste – There is a lot of it. In fact the figures are quite astounding:
The UN report: SAVE FOOD: Global Initiative on Food Loss and Waste Reduction tells us that one third of all food produced is wasted. The report makes for interesting reading. Industrialised and developing countries waste roughly the same amount of food in volume. However, most of the waste in developing countries is at manufacturing level, while “…the behaviour of consumers plays a huge part in industrialised countries.”
Globally we throw away 500 calories per day. That’s like throwing your dinner in the bin every day!
Wasted food is a waste of money, resources and is associated to a huge carbon footprint.
After reading all this I’m wondering what I can do to reduce what I throw away. I do cook most days and although we always eat leftovers, my food bin always seems very full.
There are many different ways to approach this. From meal planning to freezing bread. I’ll cover these in future blogs.
When I prepared some cauliflower for roasting this week, I originally discarded the leaves. They took up half the food bin and had never worried about it before but luckily I’d only recently read about food waste. Could I cook anything with these leaves? I realised they are similar to any leafy green.
The simplest thing I could think of was a soup. So I cooked them up with other bits of veg I had in the fridge including half a 2 week old lettuce! I flavoured the soup with fresh thyme, parsley and lemon and cannellini beans for depth and protein. I blended it smooth so you never know what’s in it.
Pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and chill flakes added some colour and texture.
The family thought I was very strange for putting this together but the result was delicious. I got 5 portions out of the soup so has been frozen for future meals. That’s a win!
Comment below if you have have suggestions for bits of veg we can use but would usually throw away?
