Extreme food waste.

Food waste makes me sad, I hate it!!  I am really proud that we waste very little food in our house, due to our mutual dislike of waste but also because we have no desire to waste money.  Of course having chickens in the garden really help with those table scraps, that you always get with having young children.
 According to the Love Food Hate Waste website:

 

"Almost 50% of the total amount of food thrown away in the UK comes from our homes. We throw away 7 million tonnes of food and drink from our homes every year in the UK, and more than half of this is food and drink we could have eaten."

This is  a subject that has had lots of media coverage of late,  there have been many tools set up to help people use up their left overs and oddments at home.
But what about businesses?   I would have thought that hospitality venues, would be keen to monitor their food waste as after all food waste equals a loss in profits.

"Research from WRAP in 2009 found UK hotels, pubs, restaurants and quick service restaurants disposed of 600,000 tonnes of food waste."

 

Last week I witness some of this extreme waste for myself.  My hubby started a new position as the Executive Head Chef of a local hotel, knowing that he was extremely busy I offered my services for a few hours.  I was asked to organise the dry store, as I am pretty good at organising and tidying.   So I organised all the shelves for the dry products, then I went on to the fruit and veg.  During this time I threw away two loaves of bread (but I did ask if I could take these for the chicken ha ha) and a couple of lemons.  Hubby asked me to clean and sort the fridges, first the salad fridge that was cleaned with no dramas. I then moved onto the meat and dairy fridge, it was like a graveyard.  I was threw away a whole box of smoked haddock fillets, buckets of duck legs and breasts,  a box of fillet steaks plus countless buckets of oddments, beef cubed up of casseroling, bones for stock, sauces and more.  This detritus had cost the hotel about £400, and someone had not had the sense to use it up.  All the time that I was sorting this out I could not help thinking , that this would have fed my family of five for more than three weeks.  I disgusted me to bin it all, but what can you do when its all rotten?  I tried to think of a way to remedy this situation, but I know that Hubby is much more organised and will not allow his kitchen to get into such a state.  But I have also struck a deal so that hubby brings home bits for our chickens, in return for some eggs for work.  Win win.