I heart Love Food Hate Waste

I met some of the lovely people from the Love Food Hate Waste campaign last week, and thought I should give them a quick mention on the blog.

If you want to be a bon viveur on a budget, I suspect that eating well is probably important to you. I’m a big fan of writing varied and delicious menus, planning a balanced diet, shopping within a budget, buying seasonal foods, planning ahead, using things up before they go off, and deliberately making extra food on one day to save time later (either for the freezer or for planned lefovers). I hate needlessly throwing food away as it’s money down the drain that could have been better spent on something else. Like gin, lipstick, silk stockings or other necessities and essentials.

In the UK we throw away an estimated 8.3 million tonnes of food per year. While some of this is made up of inedible vegetable peelings, banana skins and bones, the majority of it is foodstuffs that were once edible – therefore most of this is wasted food. We waste food for two main reasons: firstly because we have cooked or prepared too much of it, and secondly because we’ve allowed food to go off before it could be used. Love Food Hate Waste believe that the average household wastes over £50 per month in this way. That’s a lot of gin and lipstick, my friends.

So in addition to the usual Golightly tips, you might like to treat yourself to a little trip over to their website as well. They have some excellent recipes for using up leftovers and some really handy tips for portion control and food storage. Plus the first UK-resident person to write ‘no freezer-burn here’ in the comments box below will bag themselves a mini collection of LFHW recipe cards and a pasta portion measurer.