Great Ideas for Zero Waste – Don’t Throw What You Grow

Tessa Cook, the co-founder of OLIO, provides her top tips for cutting down on food waste.

The amount of produce that we throw away is not just shocking, it’s shameful. While many people see big businesses as the primary culprits, every person needs to take a step back and look at what we can do ourselves to fix the problem. In a world of deprivation and scarcity, it seems unconscionable to throw away food – yet that’s what we do, to the tune of £700 per household each year. Growing your own is enjoyable and environmentally-friendly, but it can often leave us with more edibles than we need. Instead of tipping perfectly good fruit and veg into the compost, we can all ensure that this delicious produce is used for the reason that it was grown – to be eaten! Here are some top tips which will help any household to reduce, and ideally eliminate, the food they could potentially waste from their gardens and allotments.

Preserve
Many Russians have a dacha – a country cottage where they spend most of the summer months tending to their vegetable patches. It’s no surprise that Russians are masters when it comes to storing foods, from delicious pickles and chutneys, to homemade jams and fruit wines. The quality of preserved produce depends almost entirely on the freshness of the original ingredients, so don’t wait for items to lose colour and texture – pickle them straight away and you will have jars packed with goodness to tide you over the winter months.

Store food correctly
Ever since refrigerators became commonplace we have developed a habit of placing any fresh edibles in the fridge. In fact, cold temperatures can cause many items, such as tomatoes and cucumbers, to deteriorate faster compared with being left out in the open. It pays to learn the tricks of food storage – for example, keep apples away from other edibles, as they produce ethylene gas that causes fruit to ripen.

It’s all good
We’ve been conditioned to believe that only certain parts of plants are edible, but in fact the parts we throw away are often full of flavour and nourishment. Get creative with your veg – for example, in Greece a popular dish is beetroot greens served with olive oil, garlic and a squeeze of lemon. Carrot tops are something else that shouldn’t be disposed of – it’s where most of the flavour resides, and makes a great pesto. Courgette flowers are another deep-fried delicacy – the list is practically endless!

Be generous
One of the simplest ways to avoid food waste is to give it away. If you have ingredients that are going out of date, or a monster haul of vegetables from the allotment, why not donate some to a neighbour or relative? If that’s not practical, then you can use services such as OLIO to find people in your area who will gladly take your surplus produce off your hands.

OLIO is Britain’s first food sharing service that is tackling waste. The free app connects neighbours with each other and with local shops and cafes so that surplus produce can be given to others, not thrown away. In doing so, OLIO tackles food waste by combining cutting-edge mobile technology with the power of the sharing economy and an engaged local community. Visit olioex.com for more information.

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