Nick Curtis: Food waste is lunacy — even when it’s salad

Not planning meals to avoid waste in the middle of a financial crisis is the equivalent of keeping your windows open all winter, than complaining about rising energy bills. Idiotic
8 November 2013
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My wife Ann recently passed a milestone birthday, which these days is a bit like passing a kidney stone, only with a lot more screaming. We originally planned to hire a venue for a big party but realised for the same money we could get caterers to supply cold starters, and a different stew and birthday cake, for four consecutive weekend lunches at our house for 20 or so. We also had salad. Loads and loads of salad. We put it in bowls, dressed it, and then after each meal we scooped it all out of the bowls straight into the bin.

I can’t tell you how much that salad haunts me. I wake up in the middle of the night, sweating, from dreams in which Elton John lectures me about wasting lettuce (he’s a rocket man). When Tesco announced — on Ann’s actual birthday — that an estimated 68 per cent of bagged salad is wasted, it gave me flashbacks. This week’s report from the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) that families throw away the equivalent of six meals a week made them worse. I think I’m suffering post-tomato stress disorder.

I can’t bear waste. Hate, hate, hate it. I lived off leftover stew, cold meat, smoked salmon and prawns for the whole birthday month. I froze bread and eked it out for four weeks. My colleagues — themselves so hostile to the concepts of squander or spoil that they pounce on and scarf down any food that arrives in the office like a swarm of hybrid locust piranhas — got used to weekly helpings of pâté and cheese. We’ve only just finished the cake.

Okay, so the wastage of food by individual households may not be as glaring an affront to decency as, say, the waste of £425 million (so far) on the implementation of the Government’s Universal Credit overhaul of the welfare system. But throwing away food is not just inefficient, it’s morally indefensible. Food planning is pretty easy. There are three meals in a day, seven days in a week. If you’re not sure whether you’ll eat something in those 21 meals, don’t buy it in the supermarket. Ignore the Bogofs and offers.

It’s cheaper to store food in Tupperware, to eat the following day or freeze for re-use, than to throw it away. And there are leftover recipes aplenty on this thing called the internet, if you’re short of inspiration. Indeed, one of the most offensive things about columnist Richard Littlejohn’s attack on the poverty-line food blog of Jack Monroe is that her recipes are meticulously planned for cost and nutrition, unlike the canned spaghetti he sneeringly advocated. Not planning meals to avoid waste in the middle of a financial crisis is the equivalent of keeping your windows open all winter, than complaining about rising energy bills. Idiotic.

Take it on the chin, Ash

As you can see from the photo above and the one to the left of this page, I have a lot in common with eyebrow-arching, tech-squillionaire sex monkey Ashton Kutcher. Specifically, an inability to grow a moustache. The Kutch told Ellen DeGeneres he’d tried to sprout a soup-strainer for Movember, the annual grow-in to raise money for men’s health charities, but the results were “a little sad”.

Oh, Ash, I feel your bare-faced pain. Three decades on from puberty, my own attempts at facial-hair growth still result initially in a sort of Amish chinstrap, then the kind of trampy grey stubble that might adorn a lesser Hobbit.

Movember is a fine and noble thing. But in an era where the rules of masculinity are ever more confusing it is also a source of shame for those of us who are trichologically challenged in the upper lip area.

Buck House is just the job for the homeless

Honestly, why all the fuss about Labour housing spokesman Tom Copley’s joke that Buckingham Palace should be turned into council flats? I’d always believed that the royal family hated the building, and it is of little architectural merit, its monolithic wings a hotch-potch of additions and compromises. Guests at the palace have to share bathrooms, which is why most foreign dignitaries and monarchs prefer to stay at the nearby Goring Hotel. As they are getting on a bit, it surely makes sense for the Queen and Prince Philip to downsize, and perhaps join the ragbag of bluebloods already ensconced in Kensington Palace, which offers a more attractive façade to tourists. Buck House could probably accommodate most of Westminster’s council tenants and homeless, especially if we built on its vast and largely unseen grounds. Perhaps the Queen should propose this in her Christmas speech, as a small check to the gradual conversion of all other London real estate into investment buys for the mega-rich.

Looks like the French have the right idea

Two Parisian restaurants, Le Georges and Café Marly, have been seating customers on the basis of their attractiveness: Roitfelds on the terrace, Depardieus by the loos. Or so it is alleged by two suitably hot, whistle-blowing waitresses. Surely this means the mirror-dodgers get to look at the fitties, as well as the view, while the fitties can only study each other with forensic hatred for flaws while pretending to eat. And surely it is no worse than London’s restaurant apartheid, which relegates all men with red trousers to Fulham bistros, and all men with too-short trousers to Shoreditch pop-ups.

Twitter @nickcurtis

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