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More Haste, less waste: chef Ian Haste has smart ideas to save money on food shopping, without compromising on flavour

“Waste not, want not” might be an old saying, but it’s one we should all embrace for the good of our planet, believes celebrity chef Ian Haste. It was observing shopping habits in a local supermarket that inspired the Norwich-based chef, author and campaigner to make combatting food waste a personal mission, along with trying to change the way we buy, use and approach the food we have at home. He says: “I was shopping one day, just looking around. I hadn’t thought about what to buy, and I wasn’t the only one. I realised that everyone in the supermarket was just twiddling their thumbs about what to put in their basket. It was a lightbulb moment for me. It suddenly hit me that planning is key – if you shop with a plan and you stick to it, you will have zero food waste.” Ian’s book, The 7-Day Basket, was written to help people do just that – plan ahead for a week’s meals and shop for all the ingredients they need in a single go, so everything has a purpose and nothing gets wasted. For Ian, it was the start of a journey of discovery. From being conscious of his own waste, he has become aware of just how much food is ending up in bins across the nation.

Britain is in the midst of a food waste crisis, but the celebrity chef Ian Haste had a eureka moment while shopping – we waste so much because we don’t plan properly. So he wrote a book to help put that right

How to shop smarter, save money and help the planet

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Waste not, want not

The figures are stark, even shocking – 70 per cent of all of Britain’s food waste is coming from our homes. “I think we’ve become a throwaway nation,” adds Ian. “Twenty million slices of bread a day, more than four million potatoes and 920,000 bananas are just wasted – it’s staggering when you consider these are simple things we can change.” According to sustainability charity Wrap, founders of the Love Food Hate Waste campaign, UK households discard some 4.5 million tonnes of food that could have been eaten, which is worth £14 billion every year– that’s £700 for an average family with children, or the equivalent of ten billion meals. There is some good news. Since Wrap began work on household food waste, a total of 1.4 million tonnes of food has been saved from going to waste each year in our homes, compared with 2007 levels. But as Ian makes clear, there’s still plenty still to do. A married father-of-two, he admits he was horrified to discover that 28 per cent of all greenhouse gases go into producing what we eat – plus some 70 per cent of the world’s freshwater reserves. Food production also plays a huge part in the global loss of biodiversity. Species extinction is happening faster right now that at any time over the past ten million years, and clearing land for agriculture is a key driver of this, because it removes the habitat of wildlife species. Of the 28 species on the extinction red list, food production is classed as a threat for 24 of them.

Of all the things we can do to protect our world, not wasting food is one of the easiest

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Ultimately, this loss of biodiversity threatens the human population too. More sustainable farming is crucial– but one thing we can all do, right now, is waste less food. “We throw our peelings in the bin or scrape our plate at the end of the meal and we don’t think about the global impact we are having on the earth,” says Ian. In fact, about a third of all food produced is simply never eaten. That’s 1.3 billion tonnes just thrown away every year. “If food waste was a country, it would have the third biggest carbon footprint after the USA and China. When you look at the future, it’s clear we need to act now, for our children’s sake.” Ian points to the fact that food waste contributes more to climate change than aviation, saying that if we all stopped wasting food for a day it would have the same effect as planting half a million trees or taking 14,000 cars off the road annually. “We can all do our bit,” he says. “Out of all the things we have to tackle to protect our world, this should be one of the easiest. “We all need to be more savvy, in our cooking and our buying. And make the freezer your friend: frozen food can be just as nutritious as fresh.”

As well as batch cooking, we should be thinking about how we store food. “Chicken that’s going out of date, for instance,” Ian says. “If you cook it, you can get another four or five days from that product.” As a professional chef with his own YouTube channel, Haste’s Kitchen, Ian has plenty of practical tips to share. “I look at a bag of vegetables and see five or six different recipes,” he says. “I put my bread in the freezer and we take out slices when we need them, and rather than letting food go off, I turn it into something else – you can blitz old bananas to make ice cream. “I make sure I chop stalks and leaves into my dishes rather than throw them away, and I would never look at a carrot and think that’s the wrong shape, I’m not going to cook with that. We need to value all of our food.” Indeed, he believes we need to adopt a “waste not, want not” philosophy to secure our future. “My grandparents never dreamt of throwing anything away or letting it go out of date,” he says. “If we want to protect our world for the future, we need to take the same attitude today.”

Waitrose’s commitment

Spicy vegetable pesto and salmon linguine

Quarter red pepper 2 tbsp olive oil, plus extra for frying 1 tbsp tomato paste 6 cherry tomatoes 2 broccoli florets 1 garlic clove 6 basil leaves 6 chives, snipped Salt and pepper 2 skinless salmon fillets 150g linguine Splash white wine Juice of half a lemon 1 tsp balsamic vinegar (optional)

Spicy vegetable pesto and salmon linguine

Method

Ingredients

Serves 2

1. Add the pepper, olive oil, tomato paste, tomatoes, broccoli, garlic, half the basil, half the chives and a pinch of salt and pepper to a blender and blitz until smooth. 2. Place the salmon in a pan over a medium heat with a little olive oil and salt and pepper, cover with a lid and cook for 12 minutes. 3. Meanwhile cook the linguine to boiling salted water until softening, usually 6-7 minutes. Drain, retaining a cup of the starchy pasta water. Take the salmon pan off the heat. 4. Add the blitzed sauce, wine and a splash of the pasta water to a clean pan, add the lemon juice and balsamic vinegar, if using, and cook over a medium heat for another 2 minutes. 5. Add the linguine to the sauce with another splash of pasta water so it looks rich and glossy, then flake in the salmon, add the remaining basil and stir for a minute. Sprinkle over the remaining chives to serve.

Photography: Jude Edginton for Bridge Studio

The UK wastes 3.1 million glasses of milk a day. It takes 358 million m³ of water and 31,000 hectares of land to produce this milk. If we use every drop, it would do the same for climate change as planting 5.9 million trees.

If we all went one day without wasting food, it would have the same positive impact as planting half a million trees.

500,000

3.1 million

Serves 2

Follow Ian Haste @hasteskitchen on YouTube and Instagram

The supermarket has committed to reducing its waste by half by 2030. It aims to help customers do the same with a host of innovative new approaches and products, including: 1. Partnering with the food charity FareShare to help stores distribute leftover food to those in need. Since 2017 it has donated seven million meals, that’s three million kilos of food, saving nearly 9.5 million kilos of CO2 being produced. 2. Introducing the Essential Waitrose Little Less Than Perfect range, encouraging shoppers to use misshapen fruit and veg rather than it going to waste. 3. Developing innovations to make use of by-products such as turning tomato leaves into punnets and using waste peas and lentils to make boxes for pasta. 4. Launching the Forgotten Cuts range. Waitrose buys the whole animal from their farmers so they can utilise every single cut possible, and encourages customers to be more adventurous in what they cook so nothing is wasted. Whatever doesn’t get sold in pre-packed products or on the meat service counter is used in other products such as sandwiches, soups, ready meals, frozen foods and so on. 5. Supporting sustainable farming initiatives that generate less waste, and signing up to Leaf, a farm assurance system that promotes food grown with care for the environment.

For more information and tips on how you can help reduce food waste, visit waitrose.com/foodwaste

Follow Ian Haste @hasteskitchen on YouTube and Instagram

For more information and tips on how you can help reduce food waste, visit waitrose.com/foodwaste