How Closely Should We Follow ‘Sell By Dates.’
When it comes to fruits and veggies, there is a big window of opportunity here. One of my best friends at university was the Queen at getting deals in supermarkets. She would come home with so much food from the reduced section and either cook with it straight away or whack everything in the freezer so that it would keep. She had such a knack for this and was a great cook too so, it was a natural thing for her to do. I have not always been a good cook, and so I used to look at food in confusion when it had gone past its sell by date, wondering if I could eat it. Now that I know more about food, and am better at cooking, I always try to purchase/get food that would otherwise be thrown away.
I learnt from Less Waste Laura’s instagram, as well as on Deliciously Ella’s podcast episode, ‘Food Waste and Climate Change,’ that in the UK we throw away ‘6.6 million tonnes of household food.’ That number doesn’t include restaurants or cafes, that’s only from homes across the UK alone. The worst thing is that 70% of that food is still edible, but maybe it looks a little bruised or sad, or there is mould growing on the corner of a slice of bread. This is a huge amount of food that ends up in landfills and adding to the methane released into the atmosphere, especially if you’re throwing away food still in packaging instead of separating it, because it means the food cannot break down and decompose correctly.
So what can we do about this? Well we can make sure we only buy what we need. Making food lists prior to shopping and planning out our meals for the week. We can check out apps like OLIO, where your neighbours might have bought surplus food they don’t need or don’t want and take it from them if we have a need for it (i.e your recipe needs a lemon, and your neighbour bought a pack of three lemons, when they only needed two.) We can check out our shops reduced sections and buy food that would otherwise be thrown away.
My partner works in an organic shop here in France, and we’re lucky because he’s able to take home any food that can’t be sold due to the packaging breaking or it going past its sell by date. Important to note, however, that he can only do this because it’s an independent shop. I’m sure that chains like Tesco, Sainsburys, Monoprix, Naturalia etc, have rules in place that means anything that can’t be sold has to be wasted. It’s a stupid rule, put in place to ‘keep people safe,’ but more importantly to ‘ensure the food doesn’t lose value,’ and ‘protect the companies’ so that people can’t by food that might make them sick, in turn allowing them to put the blame on the shops. Also, if people were able to get ‘bad’ food for free, the value of food would drop. At the end of the day, all big companies care more about making money than people. That’s just the truth.
However, I have a strong belief that all food is good food, even if you can’t eat it there is so much you could do with it. Even simply taking it just to correctly compost it would be better than the shops throwing it away. And so, I’m here to show you all the food I received this week that had passed it’s sell by date, and a few of the meals I made with it.
So this is one of two crates of food. Here you can mainly see apples, some mandarins, broccoli, cauliflower and a few parsnips hiding in the corner. My partner made an apple pie with some of the apples, and I used the rest of them plus some mandarin and a sad looking pear to make a fruit juice. With the cauliflower I cut off the parts that had grown mould and used the rest to make some BBQ Cauliflower Wings (recipe by Lloyd Lang), which were incredible.
In the second crate I had a butternut, some squash, more parsnips, a few potatoes and onions and I used those to make a roasting tin. Roasting tins are one of my favourite meals to make purely because they’re so easy. You peel and cut up a lot of veggies, mix them in a roasting tin with olive oil, garlic and any extra seasoning before cooking and then serving it with bulgur wheat, rice, salad, or quinoa... the list goes on! I have a recipe book called The Green Roasting Tin which I love, though now I go with the flow more when I make a roasting dish rather than following a recipe, purely because you can chuck anything in and it’ll taste incredible.
Some of the butternut I kept and roasted the next day with a bit of kale to make a roasted salad! This is a Deliciously Ella recipe that I got off of her app and you can see a picture of it here. It’s served with olive oil, pumpkin seeds and pomegranate seeds (though the pomegranate I had wasn’t ripe enough to use for it, so I’ve saved that to make another juice!) In the picture you can see that I had it with some vegetable rice made with carrots and even more cauliflower!
The broccoli was the most difficult to save. As you can see from the first picture, the head of the broccoli almost looks the same colour as grass that has been dried out by being in the sun for too long, but we saved what we could of the head and steamed it along with all of the stalks to make a simple steamed vegetable to eat as a side to any meal. Finally, we had a lot of very over ripe banana’s. Way too ripe. Impossible to just peel and eat. Luckily, I really like banana bread, and so we made two! (Though I only took a picture of the first one.)
And so there you have it. A crate of food that ‘couldn’t be sold,’ used and made into really great tasting meals. Next time you’re out doing your food shop, check out the reduced sections. Or, even better, check out the app OLIO and start swapping with your neighbours! The waste produced from household food starts with us. Only we can lower that number by shopping more efficiently, and learning what more we can do with our food.
Until next time!
The Sustainable Swap.
