I’ve been careful not to waste food ever since I carried out an investigation for Countryfile and discovered that, as a nation, we throw away more than £10bn worth of perfectly good grub every year. Families with children dump 27 percent of all the food they buy; it ends up, untouched, in landfill. Most families, I’m sure, can’t afford to be that wasteful and if we carry on at this rate, there won’t be any suitable space left to take it.
One solution is anaerobic digestion – collecting food waste and turning it into electricity and fertiliser. It’s been pioneered at Ludlow in Shropshire with great success, powering more than 300 houses. And because householders have to bin unwanted food separately, they’ve realised just how much there is and are cutting back on purchases. But it would take decades for such a system to make an impact nationally and we need action quickly to tackle the root causes of our disgraceful mountains of waste.
Here’s a start – there’s pressure now to get rid of those labels that say ‘sell by’, ‘best before’ and ‘display until’. They’re useful to shops but confuse customers. Five million potatoes that could have been eaten are thrown away every day, as well as a million loaves and goodness knows what else. What’s wrong with having just one label with the instruction: use by? The government is considering such a measure – and about time, too. As many a good cook has said: “You can tell when food isn’t fit to eat – it smells!”
What do you think? Are our sell-by dates past their use-by date? Is there any way back from the food-wasting culture we seem to have become?
Cav