Top Tips To Reduce Waste At Home

Top Tips To Reduce Waste At Home

Conor Spacey is on a mission to change our broken food system and reduce the carbon footprint of the restaurant industry.

There are simple ways to reduce food and packaging waste at home too.

Conor has shared his Top Tips:

1. Plan your food for the week – make a list of the ingredients that you need and stick to it. Don’t get caught up in supermarket specials – buy one get one free etc on fresh food. This leads to food waste from buying extra food that will spoil/expire before you get to use it.
2. When planning your meals ensure that they are relative to the other meals during that week – e.g if you are roasting a chicken one day plan on using the left overs of the roast and the bones etc on another dish , like a chicken risotto, a chicken & egg fried rice of a lovely chicken & noodle soup. You will also save money thinking this way as well as reducing food waste.
3. Use all of your vegetables – a quick wash with carrots and potatoes are better than peeling them. Lovely green veg such as Irish broccoli, leeks, scallions etc can be used in their entirety, stalks, leaves, tops and tails.
4. Avoid plastics in your shopping – unfortunately food manufacturers/companies continue to use plastics – but as consumers if we avoid them it will also make the plastic companies change.
5. Always keep your tote bags in your car so that you don’t forget them when shopping and avoid having to buy keep bags that contain plastics
6. When buying milks, juices etc. buy them in tetra packs – in Ireland tetra packs are recycled while plastics aren’t , even though we can make every effort to bring to recycle units unfortunately a very small percentage get recycled.
7. Bring reusable containers & bags when buying loose vegetables and fruits – this will avoid the horrible reams of plastic bags we have become accustomed too in every supermarket vegetable isle. Also by buying loose you can buy exactly what you need and avoid any waste.
8. Always, always, always buy Irish seasonal food over imports – this helps our economy, keeps jobs in Ireland and we produce such fantastic food we need to ensure it is not going to waste in the farmers’ fields because there import market has flooded the supermarkets and there is no room for their produce.

About Conor Spacey:

Conor has been cooking professionally for 29 years, he has worked in many different styles of restaurants, hotels, event catering in Ireland and the UK. Passionate about sustainability and the environment , he is on a mission to reduce the carbon footprint of the restaurant industry.

He is also a very proud member of the Chefs Manifesto, this is a group of global chefs that are working on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and in particular SDG2 to end world hunger.

He is the Culinary Director with FoodSpace, a contract catering company in Ireland that are the only catering company in Ireland with the highest 3 star rating throughout their business for sustainability, and also won a European award for their work sourcing local food with local farmers in Ireland.

Follow Conor on Instagram here