Leftovers
Susanna Rustin at the Guardian discusses food’s latest hot trend: leftovers. “Our modern obsession with beautiful food – and reliance on ready meals when short of time – has led to huge waste. Is it time to put leftovers back on the table?” she asks.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/dec/15/foods-latest-hot-trend-leftovers
Rustin notes “In a speech to the Women’s Institute in York last week, environment secretary Owen Paterson talked about the challenges of feeding a growing world population, and called on the WI to “help us as a nation cut down on food waste”. He complained that we are in the grip of a “cult of beauty and perfection” around food, and said that celebrity chefs as well as supermarkets should do something about it.”
In his speech, Owen Paterson notes “Incredibly in 2011 the UK threw away 15 million tonnes of food and drink waste. For an average family that is £500 worth of edible food that’s chucked out each year. At least 60% of our household food waste is avoidable. We are already making progress. Since 2006 food waste has been reduced by 13% but there’s more to do. That’s why Government introduced clearer food date labels on products.”
In her article, Rustin case studies London chef Tom Norrington-Davies who she quotes: “Cookbooks in the 1970s and 1980s always had chapters on using up leftovers. But this stopped in the 1990s”
Leftovers, [Norrington-Davies] points out, are not just what is left on the table. The woman he buys goat’s cheese from has no use for her male goat kids. So he cooks them. The cheese straws he served this week were offcuts from a quince tart. Yucky bits such as rabbit offal or “funny looking ends of mackerel” he takes home to his cat.
“Many of my peers in this kind of place, at the mid-range, casual end of the market, are children of the 70s, which was quite an austere time,” he says. “We ate a lot of leftovers when I was a lad, and I still have a horror of waste. Readymade food was just not an option, it was very expensive, and I still find it incredible that in a supermarket nowadays people are drawn to buying readymade meals because it looks cheaper than doing it yourself. It’s a complete reversal.”
Rustin blames readymeals, supermarkets and consumer attitude for the waste over Owen Paterson’s recent emphasis on celebrity chefs’ perfectionism glorified on TV to the masses and concludes with the suggestion to make Monica Galetti from Masterchef the celebrity champion for reducing food waste.
