Making Toast Is The Easiest Way To Combat Food Waste
One waste battling organization is telling people that instead of letting their bread go stale and musty on the counter, they should learn how to properly preserve food in the freezer.
Updated May 25 2019, 3:42 p.m. ET
Love Food Hate Waste is running a new campaign in the United Kingdom to draw attention to one of the biggest waste culprits clogging up British bins: bread. 24 million slices of bread end up being thrown out because it gets moldy or stale before it gets turned into a meal, according to The Independent. People are filling up their trash cans instead of their stomachs and Love Food Hate Waste wants to remind folks that they can make lots of snacks out of bread before it goes bad if they just freeze it. Then turn it into toast.
The “Make Toast Not Waste” campaign is intended to draw people's attention to the unnecessary bread waste and also advice folks on how to preserve and use their loaves a little longer. The organization took a consumer poll of 1,000 adults between the ages of 18 and 34, and found that 69 percent throw bread away every single week. One in four people admitted that they don’t know how to freeze bread at all!
The campaign suggests folks remove their bread directly from the freezer and put in the toaster, to eliminate the chances of forgetting about it and tossing it in the trash. They're even offering some tasty looking treat suggestions on their Instagram page, if you're not sure what to smear on your bread besides butter:
Environmentalist organization The Wrap recently conducted research that determined if even three less slices went to waste per person every week, it would make an enormous dent in trash production. Their head of products and services, Sarah Clayton, explained that the little changes people make can have a huge influence.
“Half of this waste is a result of people not getting around to using it in time," she said. “We can all do our bit to bin less bread by popping it in the freezer to keep it for much longer, and you can even use bread straight from the freezer to make toast, without needing to defrost it first.”
Often, discussions around waste management center on things like recycling, single-use plastic, and composting. But we can all consider how meal planning and proper food preservation means keeping food out of landfills and where it should be—in our tummies.