How To Save £1,500 A Year

ONE-THIRD of all food bought in the UK ends up being thrown away. So if you spend £90 a week on food for your family, that’s £30 you are throwing in the bin… or £1,500 a year… or the price of new small car in four years.
When I heard that statistic my first reaction was to start making a list of all the things I could do with an extra £1,500 year, from the sensible, like paying off part of the mortgage, to the frivolous. Think how many pairs of shoes I could buy with £1,500 or, even better, how many bottles of red wine.
My second reaction was horror. Surely, I don’t throw away that much food. But then I took a look in my fridge and saw there were several things in there we were never going to eat – half a limp lettuce, soft and wrinkled carrots and peppers, some prawns in a Tupperware box, a chicken carcase with meat left on it and quarter of a jar of pasta sauce – all destined for the bin. In the fruit bowl were a couple of wrinkled apples and a dried up orange.

Another statistic: If we stopped wasting food it would have the same effect on carbon emissions as taking one in five cars off the road in the UK - because all that food has been treated, packaged and transported.

I have now taken a long, hard look at my shopping habits and I’m ashamed to say that I’m totally disorganised. I rush around the supermarket in my lunch hour, grabbing whatever takes my fancy, snapping up the Buy One Get One Free or Three for the Price of Two bargains and throwing fruit and veg in the trolley as if we were on the verge of a famine.

Another statistic: 40% (by weight) of the food thrown away is fruit and vegetables, which means we are either buying far too much to begin with and/or we are not storing it properly. In the UK we throw away 179,000 tonnes of apples every year.

I don’t know about you but I like to keep several pieces of fruit in a bowl in the kitchen. But I have now discovered that you shouldn’t store apples at room temperature. It’s far better to keep them in the fridge in a loosely tied plastic bag. This will help stop them shriveling up. You can take them out and put them in the fruit bowl to bring them to room temperature prior to eating.
My discovery about apples led me to do some more research and come up with some tips for storing fruit and veg so you don’t have to throw so much away.

Carrots should be kept in the fridge in a closed plastic bag with air perforations or peeled and submerged in water.
Putting tomatoes in the fridge makes the inside watery and shortens their shelf life. Keep them in a cool, dark place.
All leafy greens have high water content so they wilt easily. To ensure they stay fresh as long as possible, wash and dry them thoroughly. Rip the leaves into bite-sized pieces and put them in the fridge in a sealed plastic container with a tea towel or some paper towel to absorb excess moisture.
Broccoli will keep for up to a couple of weeks if you store it like a bouquet of flowers in the fridge. Cut about an inch off the stem right away and plunk it down in container filled with water - only submerging the stem. Change the water every couple of days and if the base of the stem seems a little slimy, just give it a new cut. Broccoli can also be kept in a plastic bag.
Store your potatoes in a cool, dark place. If you leave them exposed to light, they will turn a greenish colour. This greenish colour is called selenium and is toxic. Do not refrigerate, instead store in a cool, dark place with good air circulation. Potatoes can stay for a week or two at room temperature with good results.
Onions should be kept just below room temperature in a very dry place. Yellow and white onions tend to have a longer storage life than red onions. Never put onions in plastic bags. You can cut off a leg of an old pair of tights, put your onions in there and hang them in the garden shed.
Mushrooms should be kept in paper bags in the refrigerator. Plastic bags cause them to go mushy.
When storing celery, wrap it in aluminum foil and place in the refrigerator. It will keep for weeks.
Store cauliflower in a plastic bag in the refrigerator with the stem portion down.
Trim asparagus (I know they’re not the cheapest vegetable, but someone may give you some!) and stand upright in one inch of water.
Bananas should be kept separately from other fruit as they make surrounding fruit ripen faster and possibly spoil. However, if you need to ripen fruit such as hard peaches, store them with bananas. They are best at room temperature and shouldn’t be kept in the fridge.

Warning: Do not put ripe fruits together with vegetables in the salad compartment. Many ripe fruits produce ethylene gas, which causes yellowing of green vegetables, brown patches on lettuce, toughening of asparagus and a bitter taste in carrots.
Here are a few general tips to cut wastage.

• Line the bottom of the salad drawer in the fridge with newspaper or paper towels to help keep vegetables fresh for longer.


• Always look at the “best before” date on produce. A lot of food is wasted because it goes off before we have time to eat it.


• When shopping, take items from the back of the shelf; they often have a longer expiry date. On the other hand some food items may be on special offer because the expiry date is soon. As long as you are eating it soon, it can be another way to save money.
  

I’m sure many of you will have your own tips for storing food and avoiding waste. If you do, I’d love to hear them. Just leave a comment on this blog.
In my next blog I will look at some ideas for using up left-overs. If you have any good recipes or tips, let me know.

Final statistic: 6.7 million tonnes of food is thrown away by households in the UK every year.

When so many people in the world are starving, this is obscene.