Today is World Food Day, which has been organised by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations every year since 1945.
Rather than being a straightforward celebration of how amazing food is, the day aims to draw attention towards problems relating to global hunger and malnutrition.
Sadly, such an event is as necessary as ever: recent figures show that around 30% of the world’s food is lost or wasted every year.
Despite this, more than 150 million children under five suffer from malnutrition, and one in nine of the world’s population goes to bed hungry each night.
Although your mum might have scolded you by saying ‘there are children starving in Africa’ in an effort to guilt-trip you into finishing your fish fingers, it would be simplistic to argue that reducing food wastage in the UK would necessarily improve hunger in the developing world. There are many different factors involved.
But given that global warming is likely to have an adverse effect on our ability to produce food, we all have a responsibility to reduce wastage.
Here are some simple steps you can take to waste less food.
Use an app
Happily, there are a wide range of apps available that can help you reduce food wastage
Take Olio, which bears the tagline: ‘When did sharing food become weirder than wasting it?’ The app connects people who have too much food and want to share it, with people who would like to eat said food.
It’s essentially Freecycle for snacks.
Too Good to Go does something similar, except it’s aimed at restaurants, cafes and bakeries who want to sell almost out-of-date food at reduced prices. As well as being good for the environment, this can be a great way of getting delicious meals for way cheaper than normal.
Apps like No Waste and Kitche, meanwhile, help you avoid wasting the food you’ve already purchased, with expiration reminders and meal-planning features.
Be more mindful when you’re shopping
Doing a ‘big shop’ and ‘meal prep’ are cornerstones of what some might refer to as ‘adulting’, activities which suggest you’re a responsible and organised human being.
But doing a big shop is also more likely to result in food wastage. Being so disorganized that you only ever figure out what you want to eat on the day might end up being better for the environment – this might be a spartan and needlessly expensive way to live, but it’s less likely to result in wastage.
The disorganised people with perennially empty fridges stay winning – in this one respect only.
If you’re committed to the big shop, then it’s a good idea to make a list beforehand and stick to it and make a proper meal plan for the week. That way, you’re less likely to end up with more food than you need.
Try to remember what foods you have wasted in the past, and then use this to adjust your lists going forward. If you’re chucking out twelve eggs per week then, you know, buy fewer eggs.
The freezer is your friend
There are few greater pleasures in life than picking up a loaf of nearly out-of-date Hovis at the supermarket for 12 pence and whacking it straight in the freezer.
We should aim to apply this level of thriftiness to all of our food. Bread, fruits and vegetables can all be frozen, along with most leftovers (you might want to avoid freezing fried meals or anything containing a lot of dairy.)
When freezing food in bags, make sure you get as much air out of the bag as possible. Excess air can cause ‘freezer burn’ which isn’t unsafe, but can affect the taste.
If you’re eating at a restaurant, don’t be ashamed to ask for a doggy bag
If you’ve paid good money for food you enjoyed, but couldn’t finish, it’s fair enough to want to take it home to eat later.
You can pretend to be motivated by a desire to solve global hunger, if it makes you feel less embarrassed.
Don’t throw away food too soon (as 90% of us do)
If vegetables are wilted, you can usually revive them by soaking them in ice water for 15 minutes. If this doesn’t work, they might still work well in a cooked dish.
Be aware of when the ingredients in your fridge are due to be past their use-by-date. When they’re nearing this point, try to use them up in a recipe.
It’s not advisable to use food after its use-by-date, even if it looks and smells fine – unless you’re hankering after a bout of the norovirus.
But the ‘best before’ date is a lot more elastic and you shouldn’t rush to throw out food once it has passed this point.
Help raise awareness
The World Food Programme is encouraging people to find an item in their fridge they’ve forgotten about (but which is still safe to eat) then take a selfie with it, accompanied by the hashtag #stopthewaste, and tag three friends to challenge them to do the same.
They don’t specifically say you should eat the food afterwards, but it would be kind of hypocritical not to.
About 1/3 of food produced for human consumption worldwide is wasted.
On Wednesday's #WorldFoodDay, see what simple steps you can take to help #StopTheWaste: https://t.co/amR3kwNURg via @WFP pic.twitter.com/jSEGbgg5J5
— United Nations (@UN) October 16, 2019
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source https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/16/world-food-day-easy-ways-to-waste-less-food-10928186/
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