With one third of food wasted every year, and no campaigns or studies making a difference, it’s high time that we started investigating whether the alignment of the stars has something to do with it. As individuals it’s clearly our fault that we waste food, and nothing to do with the social and material environments we find ourselves in. So what can your zodiac sign tell you about what you’re doing wrong, and how can you fix up? Look no further! Pisces (February 19 – March 20) You don’t understand the difference between use by, sell by, and best before dates. It’s so simple, only 45% of people ..read more

The top grossing movie of 2023. A film that launched a thousand memes. A satire on gender stereotypes and expectations, an in-your-face howl at the frustration of living in a sexist society, a fever dream of colour and contrast, and a role that set Ryan Gosling up as a living icon. With so much going on you’d be forgiven for overlooking one of the best things about the movie: the set design. A behind-the-scenes look at Barbie’s Dreamhouse showed us the effort taken in making the world of Barbie as detailed and thoughtful as possible. Items on the set were hand-made and the shades of pink were ..read more

It’s nearing the end of 2023 and it’s been an interesting year for food waste. From King Charles’s Coronation Food Project and new food waste statistics to a change in Environment Secretary and COP28, here is a roundup of some of the food waste policy highlights of the year. One important development was the publication of WRAP’s most recent report into the state of food waste in the UK last week. Notably, WRAP has finally included farm-level food waste in its official statistics for national food waste. Previous years have seen farm-level waste ignored, and with farms included, more energy ca ..read more

A Consumer Goods Forum report published this week found that 16 of their members produced 2.21 million tonnes of food waste in 2021. They say this will be a baseline from which they aim to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 of halving food waste by 2030. The Consumer Goods Forum (CGF)’s Food Waste Coalition was launched in 2020 to bring together some of the world’s largest retailers and manufacturers to try and tackle food waste in their supply chains. The report was made possible when 16 of the 21 members submitted voluntary data for the report. The CGF hailed the report ..read more

The government has rejected plans to make large businesses report how much food they waste despite 99% of respondents of their own consultation agreeing with the plans. The Defra consultation ran during summer 2022 and aimed to collect views on whether large businesses should be legally required to report how much food they waste, or whether food waste reporting should remain voluntary. 3,851 people responded, with 3,728 of those responses from a concerted campaign by the sustainable food charity Feedback. 99% of all responses were in favour of mandatory food waste reporting, and even taken wi ..read more

It is not every day that you witness the liqueurs in a pub infusing in front of your eyes, but in the Canton Arms in Stockwell, London, the shelves in front of me are lined with damson gin, vin d’orange and rhum arrangé; in the winter you’d see limoncello and cherry plum brandy, and a bay leaf and fennel digestivo pops up all year round. Charlie Bousfield, the owner of the pub, has been making these concoctions since the mid-noughties. He learned to make damson gin from his old boss at a pub in Waterloo, and at the time he had never even heard of it. But he was soon converted and started exper ..read more

#UseItAllUp is a series of recipes which uses up all of the main ingredients, avoiding waste. I am indebted to my good friend and the Food Waste Stories resident artist Erin Chapman for this recipe. She in turn learned it from an old boyfriend from Italy, so it has Italian seal of approval. It’s a fantastic zero-waste recipe. Not only do you use a whole broccoli, but also a whole lemon, and you save water too. Originally the recipe calls for anchovies but she replaces them with a jar of artichokes for a vegan alternative. Her version only uses about half a jar but I bung them all in. You can s ..read more

#UseItAllUp is a series of recipes which uses up all of the main ingredients, avoiding waste. The thing to remember for this recipe is to roll out your puff pastry to make sure all the courgette fits. I forgot to do this and had some goats cheese and courgette left over, but it was delicious simply stuffed into a toasted pitta bread. Leftover courgette and cheese can be stuffed into toasted pitta, or will go well with most wholemeal breads or crackersIngredients (4 portions, and a stuffed pitta if you have leftovers) 1 red onion, sliced 1 courgette 200g goats cheese (or whatever the packet is ..read more

In 1886, researchers at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s Division of Pomology agreed that there was a need to document the many varieties of fruit and nuts found within the nation’s borders. They hired 21 artists to produce detailed illustrations of these specimens, of which more than 7,000 are preserved today in the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection, based at the Agricultural Research Service’s library in Beltsville, Maryland. It was an extraordinarily impressive undertaking. At the time, the illustrations were invaluable for USDA publications and reports which were distributed ..read more

Oat milk is becoming more and more popular every year. In the USA, sales of oat milk rose by over 50% in 2022 to $527m, making it the most-loved plant-based alternative. It is the market leader in the UK too, with over half of plant milk consumers preferring it over others. A key driver for the move away from dairy milk is environmental concerns. However, oat milk does not have an unblemished record when it comes to impact on the planet. During the manufacturing process, oat pulp – a gloopy, sticky by-product – is left behind. Oatly made 41,000 tonnes of it in 2020, and that’s just one company ..read more