It’s a Wrap

Photo by Jack Cole on Unsplash

This article has been prompted by an email I got from an ‘eco’ company the other day, promoting silicone covers for food to prevent waste. It seems like a reasonable idea doesn’t it? Something to cover your avocado or grapefruit half or lemon? Except silicone is not biodegradable and cannot be recycled. It may last a while, but does that make it any more sustainable? It struck me as strange to plug a ‘solution’ that we already have answers to. I understand the desire to avoid food waste and promote ways to avoid it, but the average kitchen, I’m sure, has more than enough ways to do this already without creating more ‘stuff’.

I’m old enough to remember a world without cling wrap - in fact, even old enough to remember the original adverts for ‘stretch and seal’. We survived for many decades without plastic to wrap food in and I’ve personally not used it for 30 years. The catering industry gets through many kilometres of it every year. One London restaurant claimed to get through 800 miles a year and the estimates for UK usage are a staggering 1.2 billion metres. Apologies for mixed measurements! It may save some food, but it creates its own issues with waste as it’s not recyclable. There are compostable versions available, but these have not been widely adopted by industry.

How did we preserve food before the invention of cling wrap and silicone? Well, there was foil of course, but it’s barely any more sustainable than cling wrap. At home we put things in a bowl and covered them with a plate to store in the fridge or larder, depending on what they were. There was baking parchment and waxed paper which was used for cheese and butter papers were reused. I still keep a bag of mine in the fridge for greasing dishes. The truth is, we didn’t really have food waste. My Mum was a war child and lived through rationing. Food was a precious commodity. We weren’t poor, but certainly didn’t have money to waste. Wasting food of any sort was considered a heinous act and we were always reminded of those less well off, who we were told, would eat our wasted food in a heartbeat. I would have loved to save up my leftover meat and send it to a starving African, but that idea didn’t go down very well. Many a mealtime I was sat at the table pushing undesirable food around, trying to make it disappear and hide it in tissues when no one was looking. I honestly don’t remember anything being ‘leftover’ - unless by design - or thrown away. We had a weekly revolving menu and we shopped a few times a week at the local market, butchers and bakers. It wasn’t until Mum began shopping at the big Sainsbury’s store (which opened in 1967) that shopping became a weekly activity and we perhaps bought more than we reasonably needed, although as we had to walk home with it in the shopper on wheels and carry any additional bags, we were careful not to get too overloaded.

That may be the heart of the thing. We’re looking for ways to store food and prolong its life, when part of the issue is that we buy too much. We shop multi-buy offers and what we fancy. We don’t know what we’re preparing from one day to the next so buy on spec, rather than shopping to a plan. It’s exciting and unpredictable, perhaps, but it can be overwhelming and certainly wasteful. We often have so much food that we don’t know what we have in the fridge, or freezer or cupboard. Simple things like checking what we have before we shop and making a list of potential meals for the week could reduce not only waste, but the actual amount we spend on food.

This is a bit of a soapbox subject for me and I’ve written a book on how to live and shop well, whilst spending less money, so I won’t bore you too much here. Rather than sorting what to wrap our food waste in, let’s put some thought into how we can buy less and waste less in the first place. I have hundreds of ideas for how we can use ‘leftover’ food rather than wasting it, but wouldn’t it be better to avoid that unplanned leftover food - potential waste - in the first place?

Thankfully, there are plenty of practical ‘eco’ solutions for the home these days such as wax wrappers, glass jars and good old fashioned cover it with a plate. You don’t need the silicone ‘waste solutions’, the cling wrap or any other specialised food storage/covering products. You already have everything you need for an organised food rotation and storage system in your kitchen. Storing leftover food is all very well, but if it gets left in the wrap, tub or bowl at the back of your fridge, it’s still going to potentially get forgotten and wasted. I’m personally guilty of this one. You can make a note of what you have, so it’s in the forefront of your mind, or you can make it visible by keeping it at the front of one shelves in the fridge.

How do you store leftovers? What works well for you to avoid wasting food? Bread, salad leaves, bananas and yoghurt are the top of the UK waste charts. What’s the most common food item you throw away?

I delivered a workshop on avoiding food waste and using up leftovers lat year - if anyone is interested, let me know and I’ll reproduce it here.

When we have hunger on our doorsteps and not just in foreign countries, it behoves us to do our best to avoid wasting food, whether that means being more organised, buying less, shopping more often or wrapping and using our leftovers effectively. The less food you waste, the less money you waste and the better for you and the planet.

If you’ve bought the silicone food covers, I hope they work well for you! I’m not here to tell you what to buy, but it would be great if we could all considered the alternatives before adding more stuff to our over-burgeoning kitchen paraphernalia, however ‘eco’ the credentials.