Thursday 10 January 2013

Day 10: Wasting Food

Day 10: Thursday 10th January 2013

Thursdays Menu: 

Breakfast: 50g of porridge oats with water, 1 tsp of sugar and 50g of frozen fruit
Lunch: Left over baked beans from night before.
Dinner: Chickpea and Vegetable Curry (Half tin of chickpeas, 1 small onion, 3 tsp of vegetables, quarter of a jar of curry sauce and portion of rice)


Today was a great day in terms of food. It was the first day in a week I had been able to have something solid to eat for lunch. It was amazing I  almost felt glutenous having a solid meal three times in a day. The curry in the evening was amazing. Despite being a value range product the curry sauce was surprisingly delicious and it was great to have a real bit of flavour in the meal. 

I have been trying to decide what I am finding the most challenging about this month. Long waits between meals is hard, no convenience, no treats, hunger, temptation  and a lack of diversity are battles I am challenged with on a daily basis. This is very much a mental challenge, it is difficult knowing the limitations to what is available to me and trying to be satisfied with that. 
One thing I have noticed and is a real issue for me now is food wastage.  I have observed how much food everyone wastes needlessly everyday. We all do it, we throw out fruit that 'isn't quite right', rather than finding another way to use it. We give ourselves ridiculously big portions, that we don't have a hope in finishing, and then throw away the left overs, rather than saving them for another day. I am ashamed to admit it, but I used to definitely be guilty of this, I am ridiculously fussy with fruit, first sign of a bruise or over ripeness and thats it, into the bin it goes. 

Food wastage has been in the news a lot over the past few days. There is a horrible statistic that between 30% and 50% of food produced world wide doesn't make it on to a plate. This is thought to be a result of a combination of factors; unnecessarily strict sell-by dates, buy-one-get-one frees, the western consumer's 'need' for cosmetically perfect food, "poor engineering and agricultural practices", inadequate infrastructure and poor storage facilities. Is that ridiculous food is thrown away every year because it doesn't look right or because we are too greedy and buy far more than we need! What is going on! Apparently 550bn cubic metres of water is wasted worldwide on a yearly basis growing crops that never reach the consumer. Factors like this are just contributing to the impending threat  of dangerous water shortages around the world. There are people starving and dying of dehydration and we are throwing away perfectly good food and wasting tonnes of water because certain food doesn't look perfect! It makes me so ashamed of myself. I have definitely been very wasteful, but I just have never thought of the consequences before now.

One journalist wrote, 'We are often too fussy, too ignorant and too careless to reject the soft option of throwing stuff in the bin'. I hope he can be proven wrong.


Food wastage is such a slap in the face to the world’s poorest, the people who produce the food and the environment it came from. We all need to alter our mindsets in terms of wasting food. Lets have some respect for the 1.4 billion suffering with extreme hunger and try to waste less. Small changes like this if we all made them would make the world of difference. 

If you would like to sponsor me for this month I would really appreciate it. Please click here to be taken to my just giving page. 



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