Today is Blog Action Day 2011. I took part last year when the subject for the day was water. This year the theme is food which you all know we are rather fond of here. However, we also HATE food waste!
In our kitchen there is a system. When we cook, the peelings of raw vegetables etc. go into one tray for the pigs. The onion skins and other bits that the pigs don’t like go into the compost tray. Any leftover cooked food is generally fed to the cats and/or dogs. So everything is used up.
However I am now going to confess to raiding lots of so called ‘waste’ mounds of food!
Does this look like food waste to you?
or this?
Well, believe it, or not both these trailer loads are classified as waste and not fit for human consumption! Disgraceful isn’t it?
And these are just two photographs – I have many more!
People both far away and close to home, not being able to feed their children, or able to afford decent food and this is being dumped!
Don’t blame the producers!
The vegetables we get are from a market gardener who would be sending them to the dump because the supermarkets have rejected them as not being ‘quite’ right. And the same applies to the cheese – the rind on the cheese may be slightly damaged but I can confirm that cut into those rinds and there is absolutely delicious cheese inside!
When we first started to keep the pigs we approached many local supermarkets hoping they might be interested in giving us the vegetables that they don’t manage to sell. Not a chance – they are not ‘allowed’ to dispose of it in such a way! Yes, there are rules and regulations about how vegetables should be disposed of! Some places wash them in bleach before they send them to the dump. And what’s wrong with these vegetables – absolutely nothing!
So every week when the aptly named ‘magic’ trailer arrives I feel compelled to take the decent vegetables out – which, of course, then puts me under pressure to make soup or something with it. Not forgetting that there are only two of us here – and that we grow a lot of our own vegetables too!
My neighbours have been known to go home from here with the occasional turnip or cabbage or carrot.
And this then raises another dilemma – am I doing the market gardener out of business? I tell myself ‘no’ as this would go to the dump, and also for a number of months of the year I wouldn’t be buying vegetables anyway as we have our own supply….. but the guilt still lingers!
When you look at the above two photographs – how many families could that keep going?
A Year In Redwood 
That’s shocking … I’d seen a UK cookery show where they fed over 100 celebs on ‘waste’ – strawberries that weren’t the correct size etc …. but all that cheese because of a rind???!! Madness and disgusting when there’s so much poverty/hunger in the world.
When I still lived in London. about 25 years ago, I worked in night shelters for the homeless. Local big supermarkets like M&S etc used to come round each night and donate their out-of-date produce for the canteen. Then, that was banned, it all had to be binned. 10 years later, a group of us in Gloucestershire ran a community food-share from “skip-raiding”.. we’d pop round the back of the supermarket after closing and see what we could find in the bins. We’d come home with bag upon bag of food, sort it and wash it. Decent grub, which was most of it, was shared out. Meat products or anything we weren’t sure of went to pet owners. Squashed veggies etc went to a huge compost heap. The quality of food that we’d find was incredible… shameful. Then, regulations changed again, and food was sprayed with bleach before going in the skip. Market forces? Or market farces….?
The spraying with bleach is just so disgraceful isn’t it! You are right market farces!
I so agree with you Dee. And also when you put on your ‘business head’ the cost to the producer of having to dump all that good food!
That is awful, such waste. Surely they could sell it for half price or something at the supermarket.
That used to be the way! I remember as a student getting ‘cheap’ veg on a saturday to make into soups!
Excellent Blog Post for Blog Action Day! It is disgraceful and so wasteful- thank goodness those pigs of yours can use it. There has to be some way to change this!
Lisa, only thing I can say is that nothing is wasted….. pigs do eat it! 🙂
Waste is a problem everywhere. Working in the restaurant industry you become a lot more aware of what is coming and going through the kitchen especially when the bottom line depends on it. I would say that you could feed fifty families or more with all that food in the photos.
Mona I know you are right…. our only consolation is that the pigs do eat everything!
Just appalling waste Margaret. It seems ludicrous that all of this is defined as waste or not saleable. Maybe as food bloggers we should start featuring the fruit and vegetables that don’t look as good more in our pictures?
Good idea Karen. The market gardener was telling us that it is even difficult to sell unwashed potatoes now! Everyone wants them pre-washed!