Eat Ethically Waste: a Real Food issue

Date Published:

23/03/2009

Hannah Williams met up with Julia Falcon from Love Food Hate Waste to talk rubbish and how we can make less of it

Can you tell us a bit more the work you do at Love Food Hate Waste?

I'm working at Love Food Hate Waste, a campaign set up to build awareness of the issue of food waste in the UK and to help people cut back on food waste and save money. The campaign has been going since November 2007, so about 18 months.

How much food wasted gets thrown away by Britons every year?

It's a sad fact that we're wasting about £10 billion of food every year. It's a lot of food. It equates to around a third of the food that we buy we end up throwing away.

And not only does it cost £10 billion a year but that equates to £600 a year for a family. If we did something about this and cut back on our food waste it would be the carbon equivalent of taking one in five cars off UK roads. It's very significant; by making changes people could have a massive environmental impact.

Why do you think we’re such a nation of wasters?

There are two main reasons for that. Out of that £10 billion around £6 billion of it is bought and brought home and for one reason or other we just haven't got round to eating it. So it might be we've opened a pack of ham and we haven't managed to finish it or we've opened a tub of something and we're not sure what date we opened it and therefore we think, 'oh I'd rather throw it away'. It might even be whole foods completely unopened. We throw away millions and millions of yoghurt pots every day. We throw away four million apples a day. We're buying healthy foods and then for one reason or other we don't get round to using them. So that's one big area.

Then the other £4 billion is mainly made up of homemade meals and food that we've cooked or overcooked and for one reason or other haven't got round to eating it. The interesting thing about the campaign is that we all do it.

But are some people worse than others?

We've done an awful lot of work about who's doing what, are there particular households that tend to waste more than others? In actual fact, across the board there are huge similarities between households. We're all wasting food for the same sort of reasons.

You might get somebody who is working late a lot of the time or has a very active social life and they're probably more likely to leave food that they've bought and not manage to get round to eating it. Whereas you can get a family with a mum who probably likes to have a full fridge for her family - working with children you end up throwing away a hell of a lot of food because they're picky eaters and you're not sure what to do with things, you try something and they don't want to eat it. That's how waste is created. You get different reasons for different types of household but essentially we are all wasting food.

The issue we had when we launched the campaign was that really nobody had even heard of the issue of food waste. So we've had to not only present the issue but also try and get people to recognise that they were doing it too. It wasn't just somebody else; we're all doing it. The challenge for us in the campaign is to try and make it real for everybody.

Could you give us some tips on simple ways to cut down our waste?

In a way one of the benefits of the recession has been that of course most people want to try and save food and make the most of the food they're buying so it seems very sensible nowadays to be thinking about these sorts of things.

- Planning before you go shopping, trying to avoid going shopping when you're hungry, coming back from work and just dropping into the supermarket on the way home when you'll probably over purchase. Often people end up coming back with a bundle of ingredients they're not sure what they'll do with.

- Checking the cupboards and fridge before you go shopping and making a list. It sounds very simple but a lot of us don't do it. Research we've done shows 50 per cent of us make a list but only half of us stick to it. Round the shop we tend to get tempted and end up bringing home foods we've already got.

- We love [fruit and veg] to be absolutely fresh. and a lot of fruit and veg gets thrown out on the day of purchase. We'll bring home the fresh foods and bin the foods we don't think look quite as fresh. That's purely a matter of stock control. One of the things we came out with a message about last year was keeping food in the fridge, because we've done some work on the shelf life of fruit and veg and found out that if we keep most fruit in a chilled environment it will last an awful lot longer. Apples will last two weeks longer on the fridge than they will in the fruit bowl.

- There's a whole area where people are unsure about what is fresh and, above all, there's a problem where people don't understand the difference between the date labels. If they see a date they worry about it anyway, regardless of whether it's a 'best before' or 'use by' or 'sell by'. People tend to be worried about that and often throw food away when it doesn't need to be.

We're talking to the Food Standards Agency and also the retailers and the brands about this very problem to try and get some clarity for people. It's something that people get frustrated about as there seems to be a lack of consistency.

Do you think we're getting better over time? Have you noticed an improvement through the campaign?

We've now got two million extra households who are actively trying to avoid wasting food. They're not just saying 'because of the recession we've cut back on buying so much food'. Actually, what we're hearing is 'I use the freezer more', 'I'm better at understanding whether food is fresh or not', 'we now do put fruit in the fridge'. We're getting evidence that people's confidence levels are rising around food and that's really encouraging. Those two million homes will be saving around £164 each per year just by cutting back on the amount of food that they're wasting.

So what will you be doing at the Real Food Festival?

The point with coming to the show is to update people, say thanks very much and to keep the message out there. We know that the Real Food Festival attracts people who really love food and are passionate about it, and that's one of the reasons we want to go.

We're going to be in two debates - one on the future of food and the other one is the 'can we afford real food?' discussion.

Can we all afford real food? Should we all be making the effort to?

Some of it is about enjoying food and choosing food that we feel is a good quality that we can afford. The interesting point about food waste is that you can sometimes select better foods, because you're using it in a cleverer way and making it go further. There is obviously an argument that in a recession people are looking out for the cheapest possible deals they can get - but I'm not sure that's necessarily always the answer.

Are you a fan of British food?

I am, actually. I do try and select British meat whenever I can and also British cheese. I deliberately wait and wait and wait - frustratingly so - for the British asparagus season to start, and I really enjoy that. I enjoy sharing that with my family - it's nice to look forward to things sometimes.

So what's your ultimate British dish?

I'd have to say it's poached eggs and asparagus. But I'd cheat and have Parmesan shavings on the top of them, which isn't British but you could put flakes of Cheddar cheese on the top instead, with British butter.

Read what chef Raymond Blanc has to say about real food

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