Love Food. Hate Waste.

The fridge is empty and the cupboards are bear. All that remains is a half empty can of baked beans, a pepper that’s seen better days and the smell from something odd growing in the back of your fridge. Delicious… Looks like its take away again. Or perhaps not…

The ‘Love Food Hate Waste’ campaign is trying to get the people of Britain to throw away less food. We’re all guilty of it, be it the leftovers from Sunday lunch, or the stale loaf that’s sat in the cupboard for days.

The campaign has been touring for over a year visiting cities across the country getting people to use up the stuff they’d usually throw away. TV Chef Richard Fox, aka the Beer Chef, has been touring with the campaign giving cooking demonstrations to the masses,

“I think we live in a throw away society now. If you’re DVD player breaks you chuck it, back in my day you went and got it fixed. Everything is seen as being disposable and these modern habits translate into the kitchen as well.”

We chuck 8.3 million tonnes of food in the bin each year; 5.5 million tonnes of which didn’t need to be thrown away. We throw away 8 million slices of bread, 7.7 million apples and 6.6 million bananas every day and no, that’s not a typo either, If we all threw away less food, it would have the same carbon impact as taking 1 in 4 cars off the road. “As chefs, you know when food is tired and when you can re-use it and put it in a soup or stock. But other people are throwing food away left right and centre.” explained Richard “It’s also having massive environmental impact that I wasn’t aware of before. It’s not just about educating people about not throwing food away, it’s about teaching them to use the foods they have and utilising them to make really delicious food.

Now the concept of cooking up your leftovers to make a meal may seem a tad odd to you, it did to us, but it turns out it’s not as weird as it sounds. Richard explained just exactly what was meant by leftovers, “Leftovers are maybe when you’ve cooked your Sunday dinner, and you may have a couple of florets of broccoli left over, few bits of meat, little bits that singularly don’t make up for much, but when they are combined together with other leftovers, you can create a whole new dish with them.”

But it’s not just us throwing away food that’s the sole cause of all this waste. Before we chuck it, we have to buy it, and it would seem the supermarkets are just as much to blame for our colossal wastage, “Supermarket promotions like buy one get one free are also having an effect, you’re buying food you know you don’t need, and then you think it doesn’t matter if I throw it away because it was free. It’s contributing to landfill and in that sense it’s ethically wrong.”