“Small changes can make a big difference.”
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Tesco’s has been in the news quite a bit this week:
Tesco has reportedly said its suppliers are wasting almost 50 tonnes of food a week due to a shortage of HGV drivers to deliver the produce to stores. The supermarket told ministers in industry-wide talks on Wednesday that 48 tonnes of food across its supply chain had been binned in the last week, according to The Grocer. Figures are said to be a huge spike in comparison with the ‘normal’ levels of food waste. “The food waste impact of the driver shortfall has significantly impacted our suppliers’ ability to respond to our orders,” a source at one supermarket told The Grocer.
Tesco suppliers binning almost 50 tonnes of fresh food weekly in HGV driver crisis – Mirror Online
The British Meat Processors Association (BMPA), the British Poultry Council and Tesco have demanded urgent action from ministers to protect food supplies as workers from Europe have been driven away by a combination of Brexit and Covid-19.
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However, the Mail has got the support of the supermarket giant to try and combat the wider issues around food waste:
The Mail on Sunday’s campaign to slash food waste has won influential backing from an array of major names, including the boss of the UK’s largest supermarket Tesco and Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain.
Since we launched our War On Food Waste a week ago, letters have poured in from readers who described the mountain of food thrown away in Britain each year as ‘tragic’ – and said they hoped our ‘wonderful’ campaign would help to stamp it out.
This paper is calling on every household to cut their food waste by 30 per cent. Experts say this would have the same environmental impact as taking two million cars off the road. It would also boost family bank balances by £160 a year on average. Britain wastes a shocking 6.4 million tons of perfectly good food every year – enough to fill 11 Wembley Stadiums. Of the total, about 4.5 million tons can be traced back to food we throw away at home.
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And one place to start is the simple spud, as recounted by the PM’s food tsar Ben Elliot writing in the paper:
Take the potato, the UK’s most wasted food item. Every year in our homes the equivalent of 4.4 million whole potatoes, or 714,000 tons, go to waste. If you stop to consider the amount of energy consumed in the production of each one – the water used, the fuel needed for their transportation, the human endeavour involved – it is clear that we are doing something fundamentally wrong. If we stopped throwing away all those potatoes, it would do the same for the environment as taking 326,000 tons of CO2 out of our atmosphere – the same as planting 5.4 million trees…
This year, my family are doing things differently. We’ve adopted ‘leftover Mondays’, where we start each week by eating only what is left over from the week before… Small changes such as that can make a big difference. Chilling our fridges properly at 5C or less, checking the freshness of eggs by dunking them in a bowl of water (they are still good to eat if they sink) and storing potatoes somewhere cool are other examples of how we can all play our part.
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Here are a few more of those small changes which can make a big difference:
The definitive guide to making everything you buy last as long as possible | Daily Mail Online
Food-waste expert reveals how to make your groceries go further | Daily Mail Online
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