Food for thought on your frozen goods

Love Food Hate Waste (LFHW) will make its way to Cardiff on 6 November as part of its 10 city tour. LFHW’s Big Freeze event will demonstrate how freezing and defrosting food saves you money whilst reducing food wastage.

Visitors at the Glasgow Big Freeze event held on 3 October. Image credit: Love Food Hate Waste

“Throwing away good food and drink costs us £12.5 billion a year,” said Emma Marsh, head of LFHW. “If we ate it, instead of wasting it, the impact on our environment would be the equivalent of taking one in four cars off the road.”

In addition to mouth-watering meals made from frozen and fresh food, residents will get practical advice on making the most of their freezer’s contents.

“No good food needs to go to waste and it’s easy for us all to make a difference,” concluded Marsh.

The Big Freeze event will explain five key behaviours that one can adopt, especially with frozen food, to reduce wastage. They are – meal planning, correct portioning for each meal, better storage to help food last longer, using leftovers and forgotten foods to its fullest and understanding date labels – the difference between ‘use by’, ‘best before’, ‘sell by’ and ‘display until’. The event will also share hints and tips on freezer dos and don’ts.

Belfast, Birmingham, Glasgow, Greater Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield are the other pit stops on LFHW’s Big Freeze UK road trip.

Image credit: Love Food Hate Waste

The LFHW campaign is a WRAP initiative which is backed by government funding from England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

The most recent food waste figures (2012) available in the UK were published by WRAP in November 2013 and can be found here.

For more information on Love Food Hate Waste, visit here.