Deal With IT's Secretary Victoria Nicholls writes a regular column in the East Kent Mercury:
It is that time of year again when we all tend to buy too much food and then find ourselves throwing food away when it is not eaten. Statistics show that about one third of the food that we buy is thrown away – a quite incredible figure. The recent campaign against waste led by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on BBC’s ‘Hugh’s War on Waste’ programme illustrated this fact by visiting people’s homes to see what they were throwing away and by looking at how much food supermarkets waste.
One of the things that supermarkets were responsible for was the wasting of vegetables which were the wrong size or the wrong shape. In response to ‘Hugh’s War on Waste’, Britain’s fourth largest supermarket, Morrisons, has been running a trial of ‘wonky’ seasonal vegetables at its supermarkets in the north-east of England and has reported brisk sales.
Vegetables have been chosen because of the variation in their size; they have cracks or are misshapen. They have been offered to customers at about two thirds of the price to reflect that people will have to spend more time preparing them or that they cannot use the whole vegetable. Specifications for sprouts have also been relaxed to allow the stores to sell the extra large sprouts that the warmer weather has produced. Supermarkets are now listening to their customers who are happy to buy wonky vegetables rather than dictating to them what they must buy.
Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New year – and don’t waste food!
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