Food waste, fresh salad, climate change and pizza.

How do you reduce food waste? Eat pizza somebody once said to me, you will always finish a pizza.

Hmm pizza everyday I am sure my kids would love me for it, but I am not convinced it is the solution!  When my wife’s Italian auntie Marina (who cannot bear to see food wasted) comes to stay she takes it as her personal mission to make sure there is nothing left lurking in the back of our fridge, and every last morsel of food gets used by the time she is going back to Milan.

Do you ever find yourself in a supermarket buying a couple of packs of salad, opening them when you get home, eating some , and then a few days later dumping the slimy leaves that are left at the back of the fridge?

Salad is one of those crops we all could all do with eating more of, it is also typically (if it is supermarket bought) one of those that if it gets put back in the fridge it doesn’t get used.

Supermarket bought imported salad is nearly a week old before you purchase  it.  Salad leaves and spinach are washed in chlorine and then stored in ‘modified atmosphere’ packaging, slowing the rate at which the fresh leaves rot, but once the bag is opened they rapidly go off.

Salad is also one of the dirty dozen (the infamous vegetables that get sprayed more than most, to keep them disease and pest free) and because you are consuming the leaf it is better to eat organic if you can.

I was out the other day with my little boy Joe and we were sampling some of our fresh salad and radish from our farm and they taste great, (although Joe wasn’t convinced about the radish!)

We harvest our salad generally Monday, Wednesday and Friday and you will get it a day or two later, it is still very fresh. It is freshly harvested and that’s the difference.  It keep’s it’s goodness much longer than shop bought salad. The taste is pretty good too.

That is all good and well I hear you say but back to food waste. Imagine, 30-40% of food produced in the world is never eaten, because it is thrown away.

But here is the thing,  if we did nothing else at all about climate change other than not waste our food, then  over 14% of global CO2 emissions could be avoided by 2050. That is phenomenal. To put that in context, that is the same as all the emissions currently being produced from transportation, so take every car, train, plane and boat out of operation and you have the equivalent.

On our farm we are doing everything we can to manage waste. Here is what we do to manage waste.

1. We grow our own food.
2. We only harvest what we need for orders.
3. If extra has to be harvested we put extra in the boxes

Here is what we do with stuff that just isn’t good enough to send out to you our customers:

4. We eat it ourselves.
5. Our team eat it/use it.
6. COPE the meals on wheels charity take it away once a week.
7. We compost the rest.

So if eating pizza isn’t the solution to the global food waste crisis what is?  And we all can’t have our own personal  Aunt Marina to manage our fridges!

We know as adults smaller portions on the plate work.   Cooking in batches and freezing is another excellent way to make the most of your food. If you are getting one of our veg boxes, an end of week soup is a great way to use up any of the roots you may have left. 

We all have an obligation to work a little harder to finish each bag of salad we open.

Kenneth (trying to eat more salad)Keavey