A mum from South Dublin saves a whopping €700 per year by preventing food waste in her family home.
Elaine Butler lives with her husband and two kids in Churchtown, South Dublin.
She urges people to use up all the ingredients in their homes and avoid throwing food in the bin.
She told Dublin Live exclusively: "Food waste is estimated to cost a family 700 euro a year, so we’re saving that.
"I find your food bills are lower. When you waste food you are buying things that go straight into the brown bin that you have to pay to be collected. It saves you a lot of time, energy and money. It makes you feel better too."
Elaine said that she feels guilty if she wastes food because there is a lot of hard work put into all food produced.
She wants to live as ethically as possible by reducing the amount of food she wastes as much as she can.
She explained: "It just makes me feel awful that all of the time and energy that went into making that and the farmer who might’ve tendered it and the company that processed it and packaged it. All of that energy has been wasted."
Elaine recommends using online sources to help prevent food waste: "I find it useful to use the BBC Good Food recipes. I’ll put in the things that we keep, like the end of yoghurt, so I’d put yoghurt in as an ingredient and see what recipes come up.
"Once you find a recipe you like for the leftovers that tend to be in your house, they’re no longer waste, they become the ingredients of something that your family eats."
Ms Butler said that busy lifestyles often prevent people from thinking about the food they're wasting. Along with using online resources to prevent food waste, she suggests that people should freeze more food and shop more regularly.
She said: "When we’re busy, we generate food waste. It is possible to snap it out and save that money.
"I would buy stuff if we can freeze it. We freeze a huge amount of food in our house. All of our bread is frozen, we use it from frozen, we defrost it, the kids lunches are actually made with frozen bread so by the time it’s lunch the bread has defrosted, the contents are still cold and it works perfectly.
"We freeze bananas, garlic cloves, you’d be surprised. Practically everything works well in the freezer, expect things that are very high in water. Freezing is a great way to reduce food waste. When in doubt, freeze.
"I will say that preventing food waste in the beginning and avoiding having them items at all is better. Since I gave up buying fruit and vegetables in supermarkets, it’s been an awful lot easier. I shop in greengrocers twice a week and buy at optimum freshness instead of buying all at once and expecting things to last a week."
Here's some other tips you can take from Elaine and her family to reduce food waste at home:
- Keep potatoes in a dark, dry place and put them in a paper bag
- Have a designated area in the fridge and cupboard for food that needs to be used up. When deciding what to eat, check that area first
- Don’t overstock your fridge as it makes it impossible to find things
- Limit snacking so that people are hungry at dinner time
- Control portions at meal times to limit waste
- Plan meals that use the same veg so that you have a couple of opportunities to use it all up
- make soup with veg that’s past its best
- make smoothies with fruit that’s past its best
Elaine runs a website called Living Lightly in Ireland, a sustainable living guide with all the information needed to live a greener life; from where to shop, to what to cook.
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