Hands up if you weigh your food waste? Just us?

Wednesday in The Other White House is recycling day. We transfer our glass and plastic bottles, tins, plastic packaging, cartons, foil, paper and cardboard from a couple of lidded boxes in the kitchen to our red and blue crates and put them out for collection.

We also weigh what’s gone into our food waste caddy and pop the bio-bagged contents into the now lidless – we watched, helpless, as it was hurled into a collection vehicle by an over-enthusiastic recycling operative – brown bin.

We weigh our food waste? Yup. It’s an experiment we’ve been conducting since May 2017 to compare what we generate to the rest of the UK, but more on that shortly.

According to WRAP, three in five of us say we throw away hardly any food, yet UK households waste 7.3 million tonnes a year. 4.4 million tonnes of it is avoidable or, put simply, perfectly good food that could have been eaten.

When talking about big numbers it’s customary to try and make them easier to visualise. Now, we’ve been to Wembley and, apparently, 7 million tonnes would fill it more than nine times over. And despite being in a popular beat combo, the Royal Albert Hall remains something we’ve only ever seen from the outside, but the good food wasted in the UK would fill it over 210 times.

Still struggling to picture it? How about: the average family could save up to £700 a year by not binning food. 700 quid! That’s how much we’d spend on a holiday!

So, last year, we decided to start keeping tabs on our food waste – and to think about what we could do to help others do the same.

With UK household food waste in 2015 estimated at 112.6 kg per person, you’re looking at 338kg per year for a family of three. Even though one of us is only six years old, the evidence suggests that families with children generate at least as much food waste as all-adult households of the same size.

On average, our food waste is 775g per week, which over a year works out at a little over 40kg – about 70kg less than the per person estimate. GCSE maths suggests if that were the case for the UK’s 27 million households in 2015, total household food waste would have been closer to one million tonnes than just over seven.

So, what might be making the difference?

• We grow our own fruit and veg – although there’s little more in the front garden than a few hardy herbs and some overgrown chard at the moment.
• We keep chickens – Bantams to be precise. Our four Pekins – Clarence, Audrey, Greta and Bette – have the run of the back garden and we’ll keep you updated about their antics here.
• We compost at home – yes, we weigh our food waste weekly, but we don’t pick through it to determine what’s avoidable (could have been eaten) and what’s not. Most of it tends to be peelings and egg shells, but we’re not perfect and the odd blue-green bread roll or forgotten fajita has ended up in there.
• We are a vegetarian family, we love cooking and – barring the occasional disaster – are competent and confident in the kitchen. We also usually eat the same meals at the same time.
• There’s a food waste prevention expert living in the house.

Clearly, this last one is totally cheating, and it’s also one of the reasons we set up this blog – to share the tips and tricks we use every day to reduce food waste and tread that little bit lighter.

Bon appetit!