the cost of food wastage: an example

These are the weird little things I think about because I have way too much time on my hands.

If you want to cut down on the grocery bill, the first thing to do is to reduce how much food gets wasted. But what does this mean in practical terms? The other day I was thinking specifically about wasting bread.

I was eating the crust end of bread so it doesn’t get thrown out (DH tells me he leaves them specially for me), and I was thinking that throwing the thin crust out doesn’t at first seem like much waste. But then I did a little maths:

• We go through about 2 loaves of bread a week.
• This adds up to 104 loaves a year
• If we throw out the two crust ends, that adds up to 208 slices of bread wasted a year…
• or around 10 loaves of bread.
• We spend about $1.20 on a loaf of bread, so we would be throwing away $12 a year (and we buy the cheapest bread possible, throwing away the equivalent of 10 loaves of Helga’s would set us back almost $50!)
• Or more correctly we would have to buy an extra 10 loaves of bread a year if we didn’t eat the crusts.

Of course when it comes to food waste, we’re only talking bread here. It is possible that wasting one food item might be indicative of a whole attitude to food and waste. A little bread here, a mangy zucchini there, some spoiled cream, jam that’s grown mould… and the wasted food (and money) adds up.

Some ideas to help reduce bread waste include:

• Store extra loaves in the freezer
• If you find that one loaf is too much to eat before it goes mouldy, repackage it into portion sizes before freezing
• Here at this time of the year, bread goes mouldy really quickly, so we keep it in the fridge
• Toast stale bread. DH seems not to mind stale bread, but I absolutely hate it. So I toast it and then you can’t tell that it’s stale. I’ve even toasted bread, let it cool and then taken it to work as a cold “toasted sandwich”. It just takes the staleness off.
• Alternatively, you could process the stale bread and use as breadcrumbs (freeze if you have excess).
• Or make bread and butter pudding, French toast, use the bread as a pie crust, push slices of bread into muffin tins and fill with quiche filling, vol a vaunt type filling and bake, or blind bake and fill with custard and fresh fruit.