Food waste at home and what to do about it!
What can we do at home to prevent food waste as good as possible?
- Make a week menu in which you measure how much food you actually need and keep one day free for if there’s any left at the end of the week. So, you can eat the leftovers then. (Later we will discuss different recipes with leftovers)
- Keep animals that eat the leftovers we can’t really eat
- Chickens eat nearly everything
- Some parts of vegetables you can also feed your rabbit, Guinee pig, hamster, …
- Keep a compost waste bin
Recipes that contain leftovers:
- Bread pudding
- French toast
- Soups
- Baked potatoes
- A typical German recipe is the bread- or potato knödel it’s often made of old bread or older potatoes
- …
What can stores do to prevent food waste?
- Too good to go = an app that helps prevent food waste; stores can sign up and give away some ‘magic bags’ per day. Those consist of food that wasn’t sold that day and costumers pay a significantly lower price for the goods. We tried to follow the app for one store for a week and we can conclude a lot of people already use it, because most of the time when we looked our store’s magic bags were already sold out! There’s a lot of different stores on the app it goes from bakeries and butcheries to supermarkets and even some flower shops. In our neighbourhood we see there’s already a lot of stores signed up.
If you want to use the app yourself it’s very simple. You just search for it in the app/play store and download it. Afterwards you just have to sign up and you’re ready to go. The app automatically shows stores in your neighbourhood. This way you can also use it when you’re on vacation. You do need a bank card or a bank app to be able to pay.
- We know for a fact ‘Delhaize’ gives a lot of food that’s still perfectly edible to a lot of foodbanks, such a SOS Hamin. We interviewed the volunteers of the SOS Hamin foodbank last year and she told us a lot of meat (that can be put in the freezer) and things such as rice, flour, sugar, and so on came from gifts from Delhaize too.
The solutions offered here are things we do ourselves. Feel free to comment what you guys do to prevent food waste at home, we’ll be glad to insert your ideas and tips in trick into our investigation! Also, are there any typical Swiss recipes you make with leftovers?
We’ll be happy to hear from you!