Exmoor Lockdown Diary 20 - On Food Waste And Using Up Every Last Scrap
Soup, stew or stock in the making in my Instant Pot electronic pressure cooker
Hard times… But there may be just one or two silver linings. One big thing that could change because of the present crisis is that we learn to avoid binning £13 billion worth of food each year.
We’re talking about kitchen waste which could have been eaten, but which until recently contributed to the UK’s massive rotting food mountain. An estimated 7.3 million tonnes of household food waste is thrown away - 4.4 million tonnes of which is reckoned to be “avoidable”, or edible - the second before it was chucked in the bin.
Imagine the amount of fossil-fuel that was required to bring that 4.4 million tonnes of edible food to our homes - and then the energy required to take it away again uneaten. The army of tractors involved on farms, the fleets of ships required for importation, the road haulage needed to take raw materials to processing plants, the industrial machinery that helps turn it into edible food, the packaging, the inevitable refuge lorries…
A few years ago in a newspaper I wrote an entire series about the idea that if the nation could make massive strides in sorting the edible food waste problem, we’d knock a big hole in our carbon emissions. And we could do so without having to don that hair-shirt - because being a bit more careful about what we buy, cook and eat should not be painful.
Surely no one feels good about food waste? Taking a once perfectly good but now mouldy rasher of bacon for burial in the council composting bin is an act of guilt-ridden bereavement. An animal died so that I could enjoy a nice breakfast - and here I am chucking part of it away!
Bacon-bereavement hasn’t been on the menu at my house for years. Having been a food writer I take the household food-waste problem very seriously indeed. But it can be difficult. For years you wanted to provide your family with good nourishing food - and plenty of it. You were in the habit of buying and cooking food that would sustain a group of people - in my case a family of four, sometimes five - then one day you were surprised to find that you were staring at your very own waste food mountain because the kids had flown the nest.
You realise you need to be more disciplined, and buy less - even if purchasing in bulk is cheaper. But buying less is not as easy as it sounds. Take an organic free-range chicken as one example… You’ve always liked having one for a Sunday roast - but even a small whole chicken is too large for two of you to consume in a single meal.
So you either have a potential food-waste problem - or your going to have to learn to embrace the leftovers. Better still, learn to love leftovers.
There are, for example, many wonderful and delicious things you can do with a leftover chicken - especially a good bird that has strutted its free-range stuff and enjoyed a bit of food foraging in the great outdoors.
The same can be said for any leftover lump of meat with bones in it. You can of course eat any carve-able meat as a cold cut, or use it in a curry, stew, or whatever. But never overlook the potential that the carcass of a roasted bird (or leg of lamb, or shoulder of pork etc etc) has when it comes to making a delicious stock.
For, once you have stock, you have the elixir of culinary life. Stock is to a kitchen what petrol or diesel is to a motorway. The former might have terrific sounding recipes - the latter might contain fabulous makes of car - but without the precious liquid ingredient, no one’s going anywhere.
Got a feeling I might be eating a few rabbits this year…
Stocks are easy, even effortless, to make. They can be really delicious end result in themselves if you know what you’re doing. And they will make an enormous hole in any waste food mountain.
Because you don’t just stop at the chicken carcass or the leftover beef joint. You add those bits of bacon you’ve got lying around in the fridge. You throw in all those weary bits of veg’ that looked too tired to use in their own right.
Scrub the root base of a head of celery for example - the bit almost everyone throws away - and it will reward you a thousand times in a savoury flavoured stock. The same goes for those outer leaves of leek and the dirty green bits at the top. Ditto, carrot tops and bottoms.
Even the tough skin you’ve peeled from your root ginger is capable of transforming a stock, so that you should never of throwing it away. Then there are the worst offenders in the war on food waste - the bagged salad leaves which looked so good in the store, but which soon gave up the ghost once you opened the bag and let out its strange protective gases.
I wouldn’t eat them if they went truly slimy, but there’s a point at which leaves no longer fresh enough for salads will still do sterling work when finely chopped into, say, an Indian lentil dhal. Or tossed last minute into simple pasta dishes.
Back in that stock-pan - the contents can be so good they can be filtered off after cooking so that you get rid of any hard bits like bones - then you can reintroduce any cooked veg and whizz the whole thing up into a wonderful winter-warming soup.
A splash of cream from the bottom of the carton you’ve yet to use will do wonders here. Better still, bung the leftovers from those bags of supermarket herbs into a food processor and whizz them up with that last clove of garlic and those pine-nuts which can so easily turn rancid. Add a grated knuckle of hard old cheese from the back of the fridge and you’ll have a pesto which will transform your anti-food-waste soup into something you’d be pleased to order in a posh restaurant.
The great thing about these stocks or soups or stews - call them what you will - is that you put them on to cook in your Aga, Rayburn, or whatever, in the morning and they are perfect by the end of the afternoon.
At which point there will be many who protest that they don’t have such wondrous cooking appliances. Neither do I, alas. But I do have a brilliant electronic pressure cooker (you can get one for as little as £60) that does the job even better.
There will be many people who do make stock with leftovers. But if a quick trawl around some of my friends and acquaintances is anything to go by, there are a great many people who do not.
They say: “I know I should. And I will. But time is the problem - it’s the one thing I don’t have.”
Now most of us have plenty of time. And, anyway, five minutes work in a morning is all you need. Five minutes that could help you make your rations last a great deal longer - and which could eventually save the UK a collective £13 bn in food waste each year.
