Sunday, January 24, 2010

Enforced food waste

If we want to cut down on food waste we could make a good contribution by persuading supermarkets & manufacturers to go back to making stuff available in smaller sizes suitable for use in the large number of households which now consist of only one or two people.

My particular current bugbears are bread & milk. It is impossible now to buy a half a pint of milk; it is even very difficult to buy long life full cream milk in anything smaller than a 1 litre carton.

Skimmed or semi-skimmed milk does not keep well, you really need to use it on the day of opening.

It is also virtually impossible to buy any ordinary kind of bread as a small loaf – even Hovis has disappeared. I am usually reduced to looking for those overpriced baked fresh in store rolls – production of which ceases some time in the afternoon, so the bread baskets are bare by the time I get there.

People say Just buy a large loaf & keep it in the freezer. Well that's fine if you have hungry teenagers & defrost a whole loaf at a time - if you need just a couple of slices, it is an absolute pain. A small loaf needs only a simple bread bin for keeping in - carbon footprint virtually zero.

There are so many things you can eat on toast – beans, cheese, eggs, tomatoes, sardines, honey, black treacle. With an imaginative side salad maybe a cup of soup before & a yoghourt after, a well balanced, nourishing & easy to prepare meal for those no longer able to contemplate all the standing & energy required to produce more complex dishes every day.

When large supermarkets first made their appearance on the scene they were avoided by those living in smaller households – street markets & specialist shops did not insist you bought only giant sized family packs.

Then supermarkets cottoned on to this market – especially when the elderly were joined by affluent working singles or childless couples - & even more so when they realised that families too sometimes welcomed the chance to each choose their own dish for supper tonight.

I do not know why things changed back to the bad old ways.

I throw away far more food than I wish or intend to do, merely because I am so often forced into buying 6 or more lamb chops or chicken legs & then just quail at the thought of thinking of something to do with that last one.

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