Kitchen Canny

I have just completed the first week of a food waste project. Interesting! I signed up to this project called Kitchen Canny a few weeks ago, but only last week did I manage to get started. It is a 4 week project. The idea is that the first week you continue as normal, but put all food waste into a separate bin. The second week you are supposed to look at your shopping habits and the third week is all about cooking appropriate portions. The fourth week you do the bin thing again, and hopefully things are a bit better.

Now, this is about all the food that you could have eaten, but you didn't for some reason. So it includes all the stuff you find at the back of the fridge which is out of date, all the vegetables left on the plate because the kids wouldn't eat them, all the half rotten apples you ended up with after a 'buy one get one free' offer etc. However it doesn't include banana peels or other stuff that isn't really eatable.


The result of the first week was interesting in several ways. I actually had less stuff in the bin than I had expected after the 4 days you are supposed to do it. I know that we can be wasteful sometimes and I probably thought the bin would be more or less full. However at the end it was only half full with a weight of 1.434 kg. I have a suspicion though that the time span isn't really long enough to fully capture our habits. You are supposed to pick 4 normal days in the week for collecting your food waste, and although we did have 4 pretty normal food days, I don't for example get round to clearing out the fridge every 4 days. Anyway I shouldn't really complain that I had less foodwaste than expected.


So what did end up in the bin? There were quite a few prawn skewers. They got binned because nobody actually liked them, the box had 2 varities and only one of them was nice. So I guess we won't be buying them again, but we had no way of knowing they would be that unappetising.


3 potatoes went in the bin, because they had started decomposing! I really must get round to finding a proper box or bag for storing the tatties.


A fair bit of bread crusts went in there as well, solely due to the fact that my daughter refuses to eat the crust of anything. It is a bit of a pain, but except for shoving them down her throat I have run out of ideas on how to get her to eat them? It was a bit of an eye opener to realise exactly how many crusts actually go out on a daily basis. I guess I could start buying crustless bread, but I don't think that is the best way to go, both because the rest of us are happy to eat the crust and because I don't want my son to change his mind and decide he doesn't like crusts either. I have been wondering if there is something I could do with the crusts, but the only thing I have been able to think of so far is bread crumbs. I am now going to make sure that we always have a supply of homemade breadcrumbs, but at the end of the day there is a limit to the amount of breadcrumbs a family can consume - what should I do with the rest???

Then there was a small bag of peas I had to throw out. They were meant to be frozen, but in my distracted busy mum state of mind, I managed to put the bag in the vegetable drawer of the fridge rather than the freezer... oops. If I find a way to avoid this kind of stuff I will probably have cracked the big question of how to be an organised and calm parent!


The one thing there was surprisingly little of in the bin was leftover food from the kids. I fully expected that to be quite a big part of the waste. It could be that we had 4 lucky days and for some reason the kids were exceptionally good eaters these days? Or maybe I just haven't realised that my children actually do very well and they are not really the fussy eaters that I claim?


We also didn't seem to have much waste due to cooking too much, something else I had expected. I do normally tend to weigh out things like pasta or rice, but it can still be difficult to cook the right amount. Some days 400 g of pasta is more than plenty, but other days it is not enough. Likewise with vegetables, one night a bag of beans is far too much and nobody wants to eat beans, 3 nights later beans have turned into the children's favorite food and one bag is not enough. On the 4 waste days it must all have been good days and all vegs got eaten, but I am pretty sure that 4 days taken out of a different week could look the exact opposite. With kids you just never know.


As I said I never had time for a fridge clear out, so nothing really went in the bin just because it was out of date, but I do know that happens. We didn't have any overripe bananas either which also happens on a regular basis, but maybe it doesn't happen quite as much as I imagined?


So what have I learned from this first week of Kitchen Canny. Well it almost looks like we primarily waste stuff because we buy stuff we don't like (prawn skewers, bread with crust...) - not a very clever thing to do, but not really intentional either. Not quite sure how to avoid this, unless I stop buying new products and always stick with the things I know everybody likes? Hm, that wouldn't exactly make dinner time exciting. The other thing to remember is to store food properly - no potatoes in plastic bags, no frozen peas in the fridge. I will just have to get organised!


Judging from the contents of the bin I should be happy, because matters weren't as bad as I feared, but I am still left with a sneaky suspicion that things could have looked different and somehow we had 4 good days. I am going to try my best to do week 2 and 3 even though they require a little bit more of my precious time and then week 4 will be interesting. If I end up with more stuff in the bin it will definitely be proven that this was a lucky week, if I end up with less then I shall be very proud of myself. Bring on the food waste challenge!