Better Food for all is part of the ‘Waste Less Live More’ campaign which aims to get us thinking about the food we eat.
Food waste is found in most bins across Ballymoney with half the food we throw away in the UK perfectly edible! Collectively in the UK we throw away 7.2 million tonnes of food each year. All this at a time when 1 billion people in the world suffer from not having enough to eat while 1 billion suffer from eating too much. It is time we started to think about what we waste in the home and how we can take simple steps to reduce or eliminate this.
It’s always hard to think about or quantify food waste but it can be wasted in so many small ways. Think about the pot of yoghurt you throw out because it’s past the use by date or the apple that’s gone off at the bottom of the fruit bowl? Each household wastes anything from £480 to £680 per year which means the 12,000 households in Ballymoney waste between £5.76 and £8.16 million pounds, a staggering amount. On average we waste 25% of the amount we spend on food so work out what that might mean for your home on a weekly basis? Of course, food waste means so much more. It includes the time you spent going to the shop, the energy and water needed to produce, package and transport the food to the shop and all the effort that goes in to making food available for us to consume.