Once the last New Year firework has crackled and spluttered, January can suddenly seem very bleak — particularly when it is a long time until the next pay day. However, after the season of extravagence, getting the most out of our food budget not only makes sense for our wallets, but for the environment too
Every year the average UK family throws away an estimated £700 of food. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) around a third of all the food produced in the world (about 1.3 billion tonnes) gets lost or wasted — to the value of around US$680 billion in industrialised countries and US$310 billion in developing countries.
Anyone who remembers news reports of butter mountains and milk lakes knows that the problem of food waste is not new. On a domestic front, it used to be common practice for supermarkets to pour detergents over thrown away, unsold food to deter any hungry homeless scavengers. In more recent years, however, there has been an effort to make the most out of waste. Many supermarkets and cafés now send their end-of-date stock to food banks and community kitchens: a spokesperson for Sainsbury’s told Optimum Nutrition that none of its food waste goes to landfill and is either donated to food banks, recycled into animal feed, or converted to biofuel via anaerobic digestion.
However, “bakery products can’t be donated to food banks as, due to the area in which they were created, they carry a risk of allergen cross contamination so we can’t guarantee they would be suitable for allergen sufferers. But they will still be recycled or converted”.
Although many of us won’t have an eye on the bigger environmental picture, reducing the amount of food waste we produce could shave pounds off the weekly budget. It might seem a lot of effort just to save some pence here and there, but putting into action the — dare we say it — old expression ‘take care of the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves’, can be challenging and rewarding. So here are some tips on how to uninvite your kitchen bin to dinner.
Know your dates
This story is from the Winter 2017/18 edition of Optimum Nutrition.
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This story is from the Winter 2017/18 edition of Optimum Nutrition.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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