h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Are you in the UK? Do you hate wasting food? So do I. I have just finished watching 'Great British Waste Menu' on BBC1 iPlayer. It is available till 9:59pm Wednesday 1st September 2010. The BBC really should extend the time it is available.

It is a real eye opening and takes you behind the scenes at our food producers, wholesalers and supermarkets, not to mention what we waste as individuals. I am sure this goes on in many other countries too but I am ashamed of the UK.

It is truly CRIMINAL! The programme is entertaining, not a rant or a lecture so please watch if you can.

Websailor

Agreed. It seems to be an almost insoluble problem. There was something a while ago too about the huge tonnage of unsold clothes simply put into land-fill sites.

It's a shame to waste food - and clothes. I'm not in the UK, so I can't see it, but I know what you mean.

My complaint used to be about school textbooks. When I found out they were pulping them in southwestern North Carolina, I once asked if I could get some of them for an ESL programme I was running.

Nope. All sorts of bureaucracy forbade this.

Bureaucracy is at the bottom of a lot of this too. I think the waste at source was what made me most angry, just because supermarkets insist on specifice sizes,colours, conditions etc. for every item, thousands of tons of perfectly good food gets composted, ploughed back in or just thrown on the tip!!

They blame us, the customers but I find that difficult to believe, we have just been conditioned to think that way over decades.

Websailor

Susandoris,

It isn't just clothes, it is good electrical goods and loads of other stuff, just scrapped for want of a bit of care and effort. I do wonder what future generations will make of our landfill tips, when their archeologists dig up our junk and try to figure out what it was all for, and why it is there!!!

Websailor

Puts me in mind of a time I found a US Army Manual of Court Martials in my mother's second husband's library, with an imprimatur of the CSA on the fly leaf, over stamped with an advisement that it was accepted for the US Army (of the post Civil War years).

I was at first shocked and bemused.

It happened that the text of the CSA regulation was word for word identical with that of the Union and that the CSA had printed a considerable surplus during the American Civil War, so to save money, the post war US Army simply accepted CSA printing.

As a descendant of Confederate army veterans, I find that very funny.

I suspect the rules were about the same because all the generals on both sides went to the same school.

(If you're interested, here's a list: http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/wpclasses.html. Note that Custer, the Last Stand fella, graduated bottom of his class.)

This might be the only recorded instance in history of the US military *ever* saving money. Their expense accounts are notorious. $200 screwdrivers, $300 toilet seats...

My G'g'grandfather worked as a riverboat captain on the Mississippi-Red River run before the Am. Civil War. When the War came, he retired and went to work as a town Marshall in a remote area of what's nowadays Arkansas, and that's what he did in the war.

The same schools, and no one had time to bother about major revisions of accepted standard.

I knew about Custer, your classic 'bad boy'.

...and on the last, Tammany hall is alive and doing well in the DoD procurement offices and their bidding systems. One of former VP Gore's stronger points, he found some innovative ways of making corrections on related problems by means of application of Nash's game theory.

Something else on that, unused food resources, we've got local food banks serving the poor, the disabled and the elderly where superannuated foods from the supermarkets are retired as an alternative to the trash bin. Also, people often bring around surpluses of fruit and vegetables produced in private gardens.

http://www.findfoodbank.org/

Excellent idea. I know of a church that owns a piece of land, over in southwestern North Carolina.

Every year, the gardeners in the group grow vegetables and use them to feed people.

That's brilliant ITWBS, so it can be done. I hadn't realised we had charities here that took supermarket surplus to distribute, but it seems to depend on the supermarket.

Websailor

For Bel and anyone else outside the UK:

Four top British chefs set out to produce a banquet for sixty of the great and the good (?) from food retailers, wholesalers, producers, food writers and various celebrities with more than a passing interest in food.

All had to be waste food i.e. from supermarket bins, market bins, food producers and growers left overs they can't sell for reasons such as close to out of date, surplus to requirements and couldn't keep, and fruit and veg that would have been ploughed back in or fed to pigs, or landfilled. Fish and meat thrown because it wasn't 'suitable'.

The four chefs went out themselves to collect the supplies from bins, growers, producers and wholesalers, and were horrified at the unnecessary waste of perfectly good food. Either it was the wrong shape , wrong colour wrong size or just leftover, say on a Saturday night.

They filled four big refrigerated vans with their leftovers and turned it all in to a sumptuous four course banquet for over sixty people, who all knew what they were getting! All food was checked by an expert for safety. They were also judged on their efforts by four renowned 'foodies'.

Everyone was delighted with the food, very shocked that it would have been thrown away and determined to see this waste stopped at source.

I knew there was an awful lot of wasted food, but this went far beyond anything I had ever imagined. Being a war time baby, I don't waste food at all. If I can't eat it now it gets frozen, or cooked and frozen in a different form until I can use it.

It is doubly wicked when there are hundreds of people in this country who cannot afford to eat properly for whatever reason. Incidentally with a little more time they could have collected double the food and fed double the number of people.

We need to educate people about what is safe to eat, especially the younger ones who 'can't cook, won't cook' or just accept the various dates given on produce and throw good food out. Your nose and common sense is a far better guide

I shall now go and lie down in a darkened room

Websailor

There's a national charity in Germany that does that. Even in our small town we had had a branch for a few years now.

If you speak German, you can find it under www.tafel.de. The corresponding wiki entry links to this in English:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_bank

Avoiding waste in private households is of interest to everyone, as it saves money and keeps the flies out of the kitchen.

I hope that programme will be shown elsewhere in Europe - or maybe copied for each country showing the options available.

A lot of the waste - so people say - comes from the rules and regulations laid down by Brussels. I vaguely remember terms like "butter mountain" and "milk surplus".

We have these here (from the BBC web site) but I think it needs extending:

WRAP: Household food waste (www.wrap.org.uk)
Love Food Hate Waste campaign (www.lovefoodhatewaste.com)
Wikipedia: Food waste in the United Kingdom (en.wikipedia.org)
FareShare: Community Food Network (www.fareshare.org.uk)

Websailor

A lot of private waste is down to a lack of knowledge about food. I regularly have this discussion at work when girls will chuck out a yoghurt on the date it is due to "Expire" whereas I will always check if it's edible by... eating it (at home)

The biggest crime in food waste is bought bagged salad and we've stopped buying it because (convenient and tasty as it is) it is just such a massive waste.

The problem with the wartime and immediate post-wartime "no waste" thing is that people regularly eat more than they want/need because they are/were not allowed to leave anything on their plate.

And a lot of that is down to the fact that people have no idea how to cook for a family, and they no longer use serving dishes on the dining table (we're often guilty of that and I'm always moaning at for putting a man's adult sized portion of food on all our plates. I will only ever eat half that amount and my girls a lot less. (the eat everything on your plate thing is the cause of my lifetime struggle with my weight...)

EU regulation is definitely one reason for so much waste, but so is food management and general housekeeping (knowledge, lack of)

As with so much in life it's down to planning. Planning. Planning and more planning.

<<(the eat everything on your plate thing is the cause of my lifetime struggle with my weight...)>>

You and me both Sho. We are now eating much smaller meals which is better. I agree the bags of salad are wasteful. Too much in the first place, and once opened it goes off really quickly.

One of the things that really incensed in the programme was that whole fields of lettuces were ploughed back in to the ground because they didn't meet supermarket standards, yet there was nothing wrong with them. Tomatoes too small and not the right colour was another casualty along with too small eggs

I am going before I burst a blood vessel .........

Websailor

Aside from the wastefulness of this, I am tired of this aesthetic nonsense. Those perfect-looking fruits and vegetables don't *taste* like anything. They were better before.

I sympathise with the overeating bit. My dad has always overeaten - because he went hungry during the Depression, during his formative years. Trying to sneak lower-calorie meals in on him didn't work. He'd be back in the kitchen, eating cornbread and buttermilk.

Here's the trick (and I know, this may not help): If you train yourself to stop eating before you feel full, you'll feel deprived. But after a short while, your stomach will respond, and you'll feel full sooner. (I eat smaller meals than my relatives.) Also, eating slowly helps.

Now, if I could only get that overweight of mine to understand this, he'd stop giving me grief about the diet he's on... (He's shaking the furniture less these days, though.)

Another tip which I have found works very well. Use smaller plates. I had great difficulty finding any old size dinner plates, they are all enormous which encourages people to eat more so I resorted to some old supper plates, half way between tea plate and dinner plate. My husband is currently eating very little, so I have reduced my intake too, and hope we don't go back to our old ways.

You are right about perfect shapes not tasting of anything. They have been tampered with to such a degree they are bland. Give me misshaped natural things any day!

Websailor

Get a friend or relative with a garden. Those home-grown tomatoes and cucumbers may not be store-standard, but they are much better.

Great tip about the plates. I often use the dessert plates for whatever I'm making when I'm alone. Tastes just as good.

actually, I'm not actually overweight. But I do have a weird kind of relationship with food and it's partially down to the "no waste" attitude that I grew up with. That's not a criticism of my parents - I fully understand where it comes from.

My was trained to feed soldiers. Feeding teenage girls is a very new challenge for him but he's learning fast.

We get organic (often misshapen and "weird looking") veg when we can afford it, but to be honest, a lot of the time by the time I can get to the shops it is very tired looking and much more likely to be wasted.

Bagged salad is ok for me, since we eat salad every mealtime usually. But recently when the Gruesomes were away and I was buying lunch at work for various reasons, I found 2 bags in the fridge that were, frankly, like something out of Quatermass and the pit.

Luckily, partly because they are teenagers I suppose, the Gruesomes are more aware of waste issues, etc, and more likely to agree to eat the same thing two days running.