How to Save Money by Never Wasting Food Again!

When we’re children we’re taught to never waste food and to eat everything on our plate. As we get older we realise that wasting food like this is not just bad manners but is also poor treatment of the planet.

Love Food, Hate Waste is a national campaign to help us all play our part in saving food. The campaign looks at some of the macro battles and the micro challenges we all face in the quest to make a real difference and identifies how saving food can not only help reduce our impact on the environment, but how it can also be a great way to save ourselves some serious money.

1. • Never throw away bought food. Instead, grow your own to save money (and stay healthier!).
     – You could try growing the vegetables you like or if you’ve got limited space, focus on growing what’s expensive to buy. (Things like garlic can be expensive but is easy to grow and doesn’t take much room. Similarly, salad leaves like rocket, land cress, lamb’s lettuce etc can be grown easily most of the year round as they keep coming back and often self-sow.)

1. • Buy local ideally from your local greengrocer or the market, which tend to have delicious seasonal produce and be far cheaper than any supermarket.

1. • Buy what you need.  By planning your meals you can stretch an evening recipe to provide lunch the next day or even morph a pasta sauce one day into a pizza topping the next. It’s easy to get seduced by the bulk-buy deals (like “2 for 1” you often see in the supermarket) but be wary of buying a lot of perishable food that you can’t eat in time.

1. • Finally, compost everything. There are all sorts of different ways of composting for the garden and the kitchen. Just find what works for you and you’ve got the recipe for never wasting food again!
     Read more about our “Composting 101” and ideas for alternative composting solutions.