Five tips for food sustainability at home

Our current Community Champions are groups working towards food sustainability in our communities.

You can contribute towards the total raised for these groups by using your dividend card, supporting our colleagues fundraising efforts, or by donating to one of our collection boxes.

However, this isn't the only way you can encourage food sustainability. WRAP state that the majority of food waste (70%) comes from households - so the real change starts at home!

One of our Community Champions is Slow Circular Earth UK, a group promoting eco-living which is committed to supporting strong sustainable communities.

The social enterprise group provided us with five top tips for being more sustainable at home:

1. Consider your diet.
   Eat as close to a plant based diet as possible. This means reducing the consumption of animal products, such as meat, fish, or milk. Replacing cows milk with oat milk in teas and coffee is a surprisingly easy change to make, and can make a big difference. You could even make your own oat milk and save on cost too!
2. Shop smart.
   Source your food from ethical and/or free places, and try to purchase more local produce. Utilise apps such as Olio or Too Good To Go, join a food cooperative, or start your own community food group to gather food from food redistribution hubs. Think about how you can save supermarket's food surplus from going to landfill. Or, you can grow your own food and learn how to find and forage food!
3. Be adaptable.
   Make sure that you have the basics in your cupboards; cooking ingredients such as herbs, spices, rice and pulses. These can be stored easily, and refilled when necessary. When you have these staples, it's easy to ensure you make use of what you have. Be adventurous with your cooking and adapt recipes to suit what you've got available, rather than going out and purchasing more.
4. Love your leftovers.
   Using up leftovers doesn't have to mean eating the exact same meal over and over again. Instead, get creative and use them to make new meals! Leftover roast vegetables can be a tasty ingredient to a cold salad, spiced up with a vinaigrette. The same goes for pulses, rice and pasta - the possibilities are endless! Love Food Hate Waste have some great have some great ideas to get you inspired. Anything you can't make use of in the kitchen can be made into compost, fed to animals, or thrown onto your veg patch as fertiliser.
5. Pickle and preserve.
   In order to make the most of your fresh produce, revert back to this old school tried and tested method. You can create delicious chutneys, jams, pickles, cordials and even wine!

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