What do you think of Tesco's announcement of how much food is wasted from their stores. Read about it HERE. 30,000 tonnes thrown away in 6 months. I wasn't surprised at the amount, there have been a couple of programmes on TV about supermarket waste, but up until now they have been very secretive about these figures. Then they do a little twist in the tale that tells us that customers waste food too. We throw out fruit, salad leaves and bakery products apparently. It has been estimated that every house hold throws out £700 worth of food each year. NOT THIS HOUSEHOLD!
Now there are just two of us, very little gets wasted, I cook what we need and no more. Years ago it was possible to feed food waste to chickens but if you sell eggs this is definitely against the law and even if you don't it's not advised. Garden waste is fine and our chickens get all the outside lettuce and cabbage leaves, squishy tomatoes, unwanted marrows etc.
One of the causes of customer food waste according to Tesco is the way they do 2 for 1 offers on things. We are tempted by BOGOFs then chuck some out because we've bought too much!
What I have noticed is the way their Value range is often in bigger packs. Carrots for instance ( something I do buy as they don't do well here on our clay soil.)The value range is the cheapest way to buy, yet the bag is huge. This is fine if you know that the best way of storing them is to take them out of the bag and lay them on a clean tea-towel in the salad draw of the fridge. But my guess is a lot of people would leave them in the bag, where they would sweat and soon go mouldy. Bananas are the same- value range = biggest bag. How many people would know that its best to keep then separate from all other fruit and how to make a banana cake with them as the start to go brown?
Tesco say they will change the way they offer bargains. Doing more of the buy two things and get a third thing free over a range of products.As they do on home baking products every now and again.
Perhaps this will be better for customers but what I'm sure off is that it's probably a lot better for Tesco. If you buy a bag of apples for a pound and a bag of pears for a pound and a lemon for 25p then its the lemon that will be the free thing. Customers will need to be even more canny with what they buy to get a bargain, maybe putting things through the till in separate bits - and how many busy people with no time to spare will do that?
I promised an update on library books read this month. I'm not getting on very well. Authors I've read before have been OK but trying some new authors didn't work - I couldn't get into any of them.
These are the ones I HAVE enjoyed so far
The series by Nicola Upson, also crime, features Josephine Tey ( a real writer) and these are also set in the 1930's. Again it's best to start at the beginning.
Rachel Hore writes fiction which always links two periods in history in some way or another. Each is a stand alone novel. This one - The Silent Tide- starts in the 1953 floods in Suffolk.
The weather forecast for today was horrible and it was raining early this morning but then it stopped so after I had got a couple of loaves of bread started we picked some more cooking apples to sell and got the sides of an old shed ( rescued from a friend) cut into bits ready for me to turn into kindling wood.We had a bit more rain at about 10.30 but since then fine all day.
