Environment

New Year's Resolution: Don't Waste that Holiday Food!

by josiemitchell | January 2, 2009 at 01:52 pm

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Perhaps this New Year's you've made the resolution to eat less, and you may plan to go through the refrigerator and chuck all the unhealthy food leftover from the holidays. Perhaps you're canning the candy canes that are lying around the house and pledging to be healthier. Well, you may want to rethink chucking all that food out. It just adds to the alarming amount of Holiday Waste.

In Britain:

As a nation, we waste £16m worth of turkey, £40m of cheese and £60m of sausages every year. That's 1.2m bangers binned every day. Unsurprisingly, wasteful activity peaks over Christmas.

In the United States:

Each day, America wastes enough food to fill Madison Square Garden. Depending on which study you believe, we squander between a quarter to a half of all the food we produce. Even by the conservative estimate, that adds up to more than 100 billion pounds per year.

That is a lot of food wasted! Certain foods can be composted but some foods, such as meats and processed foods (like candy canes), cannot. So instead of throwing out, remember composting and think about some creative uses for leftovers.

While no one wants to eat brussels sprouts 10 days after they were cooked, Julia Falcon, of the Love Food Hate Waste campaign, recommends we rid ourselves of some of our extras by "free lunching"; returning to our offices "with a lunchbox full of festive goodies to cheer ourselves up". She also reminds us that leftovers can be healthy. "They're not just comfort foods. Take, for example, turkey noodle soup, cold meat salads, smoked salmon scrambled eggs," she says and advises we resist the temptation to bin "unhealthy" food (such as rich cheeses and chocs) as part of our new year detox: "If we store them well we can continue to pick at them in small amounts, keeping us going through the dark January weeks."

Seek inspiration for "leftover" recipes such as Christmas pudding strudel and pear and Stilton toasts at www.lovefoodhatewaste.com.