Fighting food waste with Plate Up For Fife
The issue we face
Recently, the UN had its annual International Day Of Awareness on Food Loss and Waste Reduction. Snappy title right? This day highlights the importance of reducing and minimising global food waste.
In the news just the other week was a campaign urging the UK government to force companies to record their food waste. The logic is that by making companies face how much food they are wasting, they will then take steps to try to reduce that amount and create more efficient processes and systems. This would be a small but important step in fighting climate change by addressing the issue of food waste. And while more governments and large companies need to do a lot more, as individuals, we can also play our part.
In the UK, a quarter of all food grown is never eaten. That amounts to around 10-13 million tonnes of food waste every year (Source: Food Foundation). If we were able to halve that, we could save and offset the equivalent of 51 million tonnes of CO2. So however minor or insignificant it might seem, every time you can stop food from going in the bin, it adds up to a big difference.
Creating change through cooking
As part of the Fife Climate Festival, we held two Plate Up For Fife sessions in our training kitchen at 8 East Fergus Place. We regularly run these free workshops, showing people the importance of eating more locally sourced and seasonal produce as well as how to reduce their own personal waste by using up leftovers, only buying as much food as they’ll actually use, keeping their fridges organised and not overly packed and making a meal plan for the week.
One of our participants made an “inverse cottage pie” pie by mashing up leftover baby potatoes and lining a casserole dish with them, before filling it with leftover beef Bolognese and topping that with more mashed potatoes. Another used some braised cabbage, peppers, potatoes and beef mince to make a kind of hotpot. All using food that might have otherwise gone to waste.
In the second session, we used kale grown in a raised bed planter right outside the Greener Kirkcaldy building! So rather than food miles, we were looking at food metres! We used the kale to make kale crisps and a kale, apple and beetroot salad with maple and tahini dressing.
There’s no doubt that eating local and seasonal food in Scotland during the winter can be tough (everyone loves potatoes but there’s only so much you can do). But, by getting a bit creative and thinking outside the box, we can all do our bit to combat the climate emergency and reduce food waste.
Tony Perkins
Development Worker, Community Food Team
Resources
Massaged Kale Salad With Maple Tahini Dressing – Walder Wellness, RD
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