Love Food, Hate Waste

More than 70 residents took part in Dacorum Borough Council’s Love Food, Hate Waste challenge before Christmas, becoming food champions as they learned how to get food waste savvy in the kitchen.

Most people took part in the challenge because they wanted to help the environment. Some knew that they wasted too much food already, whilst others knew that they were already pretty good at saving food and wanted to see if they could do better.

Regular tips were emailed to them over the course of a month and all those taking part received a free goody bag too. On average, the amount of food wasted by the participants halved by the end of the month-long challenge

The food champions told Dacorum Borough Council that the top tips they learned from the challenge which helped them to save the most amount of food was: meal planning; freezing food; checking what needs to be used before going shopping and only buying what is needed.

Practical advice on how to reduce food waste helped challengers to save an average of £32 on food throughout the month, with one person saving over £100 in total. Most participants told us that they expect this money saving to rise as well as they get used to building the tips and tricks into their daily routine.

One lucky champion, Gemma Luke was also the winner of a brand new blender in the prize draw, saying: ‘We don’t tend to waste a lot of food but I found a lot of the tips helpful, particularly about freezing fresh herbs as this hadn’t occurred to me before. My husband and I never win anything, so we were really happy to receive our new blender.’

Reducing the amount of food wasted is important for a range of social and environmental reasons – currently, nearly a third of all food produced goes uneaten!

The Love Food, Hate Waste challenge will be running again in 2019. To take part email r4d@dacorum.gov.uk