Hugh’s War on Waste and Crowdfunder have created a site where local community food projects working with waste can post fundraising appeals. There are many and will be more. You can really get the feeling for a movement developing, and appreciate how hard so many people are working on this problem.
This is place to ask and to give. UK readers, please add your group, support some others if you can, and share the link:
FOOD WASTE AND LEFTOVERS ADVICE:
RECONSIDERING TAKEAWAYS, READY-MEALS, GRAVY AND CONVENIENCE FOOD… DEFANCIFYING THE MESSAGE…
Hubbub is a UK organisation using creative, participatory events to reduce domestic food waste. Two of their projects are on my mind right now. #PumpkinRescue is all about giving Halloween pumpkins a culinary afterlife. (I hope to take part in a Disco Soup event in Salford; check out events in your area.) #ExpressYourShelf asks people to prepare meals based on what they have on hand, and take “shelfies.” Here’s what we got up to last year at this time.
Fun. Meanwhile, the estimable Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is soon coming out with a new book and tv series on leftovers, “all about creating delicious meals from all those bits and bobs that are leftover from the last meal we cooked, ” says he.
Conversations about “leftovers” are everywhere these days, as concern mounts about food waste and its ecological impact, as well as the moral issue of throwing out edible food in light of local and global hunger– all pretty well summarised in the video posted above. Food waste is a large and multifaceted problem, with domestic waste being one part of that; I like to think that by not wasting food individuals can save money and be empowered to discuss and act on systemic problems too. Connecting different levels.
On the whole I’m pretty good at not wasting — except when life and work get busy and I lose focus on the shopping/cooking nexus– but that’s the point. Not wasting in our world of excess and too-muchness requires a focus and becomes a task and priority in itself that needs to be made easier.
So we might have to do things differently. Read the rest of this entry »
.…in which Kitchencounterculture explores local food, locavorism, veganism, climate impacts of diet, and A MASSIVE LIST OF RABBIT RECIPES from a really great collection of cookbooks…
In my freezer are two rabbits, which a local man, H, the getting-elderly but still a-hunting brother of a friend, had in his freezer. For £3 each it was hardly a sale but rather an exchange. “Cook it like a chicken,” he advised, and told me he’d cut it in seven pieces: two back legs, 2 front legs, two middle bits and a “bonnet” (the ribs). He recommended I “casserole” it: fry the pieces in a pan with carrots and onions, then tip it in a roasting tin with gravy, or wine, or beer.
My friend, H’s brother P, said H would have hung it for a few hours after bringing it home (probably this time with a ferret not a rifle — I didn’t think to ask but will, and will update here), then gutted it, then hung it again for a few days before skinning and putting it into parts. These are men who’s childhoods would have been 70 years ago. H remembers his mother Sybyl roasting rabbit very plainly, but she would never eat anything wild herself, though duck was also on the menu for these country children of mid-Wales back then.
Kitchen Counter Culture 