MY CHOSEN IDEA:
My favourite idea I came up with this week in our brainstorming session was my food waste reduction recipe app. Something I really struggle with especially as a student is cooking quickly on a low budget with no wastage; these three things seem impossible without the sacrifice of health.
IDENTIFYING THE PROBLEMS
As food waste is such a broad topic to try and control using an app, I’ve split my research sections into cooking and buying habits, and the statistics behind the wastage
BAD COOKING AND BUYING HABITS:
Something everyone should be aware of is that bad cooking habits, and the cause of food wastage doesn’t start in the kitchen, they start in the supermarket when you’re buying your ingredients.
CAUSES OF BAD BUYING HABITS:
- Lack of understanding of nutrition
- you buy food you think is healthy, then don’t know how to cook it in a tasty way and so it doesn’t get eaten
- Buying food that you own already
- Buying too many ingredients for recipes you’ll never cook with again
CAUSES OF BAD COOKING HABITS:
- Not having enough time to cook proper recipes and so you rush – only eating non nutrient dense food
- cooking a new recipe but buying in ingredients that you never find a use for again and they inevitably go off
FOOD WASTE STATISTICS:
- Over ⅓ of all food produced globally goes to waste.
- The UK throws away around 9.5 million tonnes of food waste in a single year – even though 8.4 million people in the UK are in food poverty.
- Billions of pounds are wasted each year when food is disposed of unnecessarily.
- This emits 25 million tonnes of CO2e – more than Kenya’s total annual emissions