Tesco blames customers for food waste

Apparently customers are responsible for food waste, because when faced with a tray of apples they only pick the good looking ones (who wouldn’t?). But for some reason you don’t do this if you’re from Eastern Europe. I’m sorry, but I cannot believe that Polish customers seek out the worst apples in the tray!

If Tesco wants us to buy imperfect fruit and veg then they should recognise that it’s not perfect by discounting the price. Sainsburys do this quite a lot already and don’t have a problem getting customers to buy it.

Brussels sprouts – love `em or hate `em?

Personally I hate Brussels sprouts. I haven’t cooked one for decades, but I may have eaten one or two at office Christmas lunches (in my former life). It’s not that I don’t like green vegetables – this couldn’t possibly be the case, as only yesterday evening I cooked a ‘green risotto‘ (more about this tomorrow).

They just don’t – in my opinion – taste nice.

I now see that Waitrose has come up with the ‘Kid Friendly’ sprout. I’m not sure why they’ve restricted the name to ‘children’, I’m sure there must be a lot of adults who hate this awful vegetable as well, particularly as “previous polls have suggested nearly a third of the sprouts bought in the run-up to Christmas Day are actually eaten” (ie more than 2/3rds are wasted!).

Mind you, as far as waste is concerned, given that most pre-Christmas supermarket shoppers appear to be stocking up for WW3, this enormous rate of food waste may not be unique to Brussels sprouts!

Domestic food waste reduced in last five years

The huge amount of food wasted by UK households has hit the headlines once more.

This Guardian article concentrates on the sheer quantity of wasted food: “The average UK family is wasting nearly £60 a month by throwing away almost an entire meal a day”. This figure comes from a report by WRAP (the government’s waste advisory body, the Waste & Resources Action Programme).

What is surprising about the report is that it states: “that the amount of food and drink thrown away that could have been eaten fell by 21% between 2007 and 2012”. This sounds like a major improvement to me, although there’s still plenty of room for further savings!
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Tesco says almost 30,000 tonnes of food ‘wasted’

Images from: Joonggul Ro’s PG02

This BBC article is based on food waste figures published by Tesco for the first six months of this year.

The figures include food wasted before it arrives at Tesco, and food bought by its customers which is never consumed. Tesco estimates that “families are wasting an estimated £700 a year and we want to help them keep that money in their pockets, rather than throwing it in the bin”.

£700 represents about 50% of the average annual dual-fuel bill (gas and electricity) of £1,315 per household, so wasting less food could help a lot.

Tesco claims that 1 in 10 bananas purchased is thrown away, and also high in the customer wastage stakes is packaged salad (most likely because the bags are too big) and bread.

There are many ways to use up (or to avoid creating these left-overs in the first place):

• overripe bananas can be made into muffins (or banana bread) and can be frozen so you don’t need to eat them all at once; also, if you have a robust liquidiser or food processor you can create some fruity ‘ice cream’ by combining ripe bananas, frozen fruit (use it straight from the freezer) and yogurt;
• left-over bread ccould be made into croutons, breadcrumbs (dried in the oven, bread pudding or bread and butter pudding;
• maybe bagged salad should be avoided – you can always shred a white cabbage (a section of white cabbage will last a long time in the fridge) and grate root vegetables. If you do want some green leaves then Lidl does small bags of (unwashed) wild rocket (I think it was 79p last week).

Of course, another way to reduce customer wastage is to stop doing multi-buy deals on perishable food (at Tesco these deals on large bags of salad have ceased) and to reduce the size of perishable food displays which Tesco is also doing.

I can’t help thinking there’s a conflict of interest here. If lowering customer food wastage leads to customers spending less at Tesco, and Tesco sales fall, this won’t be good (for Tesco).

How huge amounts of food are wasted at home

A report by the UK’s global food security programme entitled ‘Food waste within global food systems‘ has attracted headlines such as ‘Up to two-fifths of fruit and veg crop is wasted because it is ‘ugly’‘ but this by no means tells the whole story. ‘Ugly’ food is wasted before it even gets home.

According to the report (p12) “38 million tonnes of food and drink enter UK homes each year, of which nearly one fifth is discarded. This translates into a £12 billion annual food surplus, costing £480 per average household and £680 for family households”. “On average, households amass over 5kg total food waste weekly”.  This is in part from cooking too much (which encourages people to overeat anyway – is obesity a form of food waste?), but mostly from food going out of date.

Apparently “single-person households generate the most waste”. This is partly attributed to singletons being “challenged by pack sizes and BOGOF retail promotions”. Although the report also says that “Households which typically generate the least food waste” include “the elderly” (whom I understand represent a substantial proportion of the lone household population), one possible reason being “a ‘wartime mentality’ towards food”. This seems to be more than balanced out by the other end of the age range: “Younger-person households appear unprepared and inexperienced in managing food within their homes. Individuals are less likely to check stocks prior to shopping and are less familiar with food storage”.

“Families with children” are also cited as high generators of food waste, but then it is very difficult to efficiently manage a child’s transient whims as to its food likes from one week to the next!

I think that all this points to greater upfront planning leading to less food waste. This week I planned my main meals around what was already available to use (thanks to ‘At Home with Mrs M‘). Although this is one of the fundamental missions of this blog, by writing down exactly what I was going to cook it ensured that I kept to the plan (especially as I had to cook all the meals in order to detail them in this blog!).