Food for thought: fighting food waste

“PEOPLE EITHER CARE ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT OR MONEY – AND SLINGING FOOD INTO A BIN DOESN’T MAKE SENSE TO ANY OF THEM”

Borough Market, which is run by a charitable trust, exists “for community, the love of food and a better tomorrow”. This statement informs everything from our Food Policy to our work with local schools; it also sparks lots of questions about what we do and why we do it. This autumn, we’re throwing some of those same questions out to experts beyond the Borough Market community.

This week’s answer comes from Martyn Odell of Lagom Chef. Martyn is a self-described “food waste disruptor” – a chef who started harnessing the power of social media to help people save money and reduce their environmental impact.

Question: What can shoppers do to reduce their food waste?

When it comes to food waste, my message is simple: “Eat the food you buy.” There really is no better solution. If you buy a banana and then eat the banana, you’ve played your part.

The beauty of this solution is that it works for everyone. There are people who care strongly about the environment, and there are people who care more about money – and the good news is that slinging something you’ve bought into a bin makes no sense to any of them.

When food takes so long to produce and uses so many of our planet’s valuable resources, to throw it away seems barbaric and stupid. The production of food is a major contributor to climate change and environmental degradation, and yet so much of it is wasted. And it’s wasted by us. In the UK, 70 percent of food waste comes from people’s homes, and only 30 percent from business. When I tell people that fact, almost everyone says: “That can’t be true. Think about retail, hospitality, farming – surely that’s where the fault lies?” But no. We can’t go blaming supermarkets. We’re the problem, and it’s up to us to fix it.

At the heart of my philosophy is the idea that the dry store is the backbone of every kitchen: tins, sauces, pulses, spices, rice, pasta, all that great stuff that doesn’t really go off. Have a good dry store, then plug in fresh ingredients as and when you need them. When you’re buying produce, buy what you need, not what you think you might possibly need. You don’t have to fill the fridge: “Let’s get the chicken and the mince and a steak and loads of veg, just in case.” In London, we live in a city where most people can easily pop to the shops, pop to the market, and buy a courgette or a bit of chicken.

Meal planning helps, but while that works for some people, it’s not for everyone. I know it doesn’t work for me. I’m a freelancer with a family, and things change day by day. I’m not much of a planner, so I rely on being able to create a dish from dry store ingredients – take some spices and some beans and tinned tomatoes, throw in an onion and a courgette and I’ve got a veggie chilli. That’s the mindset I try to help people get into.

Of course, the reality is that shops often make it quite hard to buy only what you need. I’ve done a lot of work with WRAP and Love Food Hate Waste, and they’re both big on buying loose produce whenever possible. The amount of waste you can save just by doing that is insane. Markets like Borough are great – you can pick up one potato, two eggs, whatever you want. That’s perfect, ideal. But if you go to a Tesco Express, you’re getting two courgettes in a packet even if you only want one. To me the answer is obvious: don’t complain, just eat the other courgette. Either make more of whatever you’re cooking, or tomorrow you’re going to have to eat courgette again – and that’s hardly a problem. There must be 30 or 40 different ways of cooking a courgette. It doesn’t have to be a Michelin-starred meal. You could have it raw in a salad, thrown into a stir-fry or put through a sauce. Or you could blitz it down and put it in the freezer.

The freezer is one of our allies. I always say that if you’re in the kitchen making dinner, rather than being completely focused on the here and now, you should look to the future. Pickles and ferments are great, but freezing is often the easiest route. If you’re making a stir-fry and you’ve got too many peppers, why not sit there for five minutes longer, trim and slice them up and put them in the freezer for another day? If you’ve got too many potatoes, parboil them, freeze them, and you’ve got a load of half-cooked roasties ready to go. It takes time now, but it saves time later. Around 2.7 million potatoes are thrown away every day in Britain, and there’s no excuse for that.

Martyn’s tuna pitta recipe

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Your eyes and nose are also your friends. Forget about best-before dates; it’s only use-by dates that matter. But even then, some common sense can be applied. People are slinging out dairy products left, right and centre, and it’s often completely unnecessary. A few years ago, Too Good To Go did a campaign called Look, Smell, Taste, Don’t Waste. The idea is: look at the yoghurt, if it looks fine have a smell, then move on to tasting. It’s so easy. And don’t worry about a little fleck of green on the side of the yoghurt pot – if there’s a tiny bit of mould, that doesn’t mean the whole thing is inedible.

The important thing to remember is that any small change makes a big change. You don’t have to be perfect. A lot of what we read about cutting out food waste seems unattainable to most people. Sure, banana skin chutney is delicious, but what if your family gets through 20 bananas a week? Drying out onion skins is great – personally, I do keep some of mine for making stock –but is that something you’re realistically going to do every day in your house? Probably not, and that’s okay.

The main thing is to consume the part of the ingredient you bought it for. If you buy a banana, eat the banana. My message is: eat grub. Really, that’s all there is to it.