Aine Carlin 

We all love bagged salads – but they’re the tip of the food waste iceberg

Each year in the UK we throw away 178m bags of these prepared salads. Consumers and retailers must rethink shopping to stop unnecessary waste
  
  

A bagged salad.
‘It is endlessly tempting to grab an already prepped salad bag. ’ Photograph: Steve Moss/Alamy

I can’t deny I continue to give in to the lure of the humble bagged salad. Shameful as it is for a two-time cookbook author to admit, I do genuinely find them rather handy … even if all that plastic does make me cringe. Luckily for me, my husband is a bit gung ho when it comes to his greens, so nothing ever gets tossed, but I do often wonder about their shelf life and what becomes of all that waste. About 40% of the bagged salad we in Britain buy every year is thrown out: 178m bags.

A quick look on the Wrap website (an organisation that deals specifically with waste reduction in the fresh produce sector) tells you that more than 4.2m tonnes of perishable food is wasted or lost each year – that’s £700 a family. It’s a shocking statistic, to say the least, and one that reflects poorly on our convenience-led society, whjich thinks nothing of discarding a half-used, perfectly edible bag of leaves.

Whether it’s at the retail end or in our own kitchens, there’s no denying that collectively the system could be working much more effectively to ensure less produce is thrown away each year.

Putting pressure on larger retailers has been a powerful tactic in the past (thanks to the likes of Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall, Jamie Oliver and Jimmy Doherty), with the introduction of “wonky veg” areas that sell produce deemed too imperfect to offer at full retail price. When Asda introduced such a system in 2016 it was initially met with borderline revolt from the public, who apparently would rather pay double for a perfectly straight parsnip than one with a bit of a bend (and don’t even get me started on bananas) –although, thankfully, the award-winning scheme is still running today.

Perhaps if supermarkets applied the same logic to bagged salads and ended promotions that encourage consumers to buy more than they need or can feasibly use in a week, we might see a marked decline in such unnecessary waste.

Unfortunately, though, we cannot put all the blame at the retailers’ feet, for we too play a pretty important role in this whole terrifyingly solvable waste scenario. Recent data shows that a mere 1% of all food waste is supermarket derived, with almost 7.3 tonnes coming (or going out of, should we say) the family home – that’s nearly £13bn worth of perfectly fine food going straight in the bin for no good reason.

The Love Food Hate Waste initiative has been hugely successful in getting consumers to not only be more frugal but also provides the necessary tools to help us utilise every last scrap in an array of accessible, penny-pinching recipes. This has been echoed in the zero-waste food events that are cropping up all over the country, in which talented chefs are leading the way in showing us how the odds and ends we typically dispose of can be transformed into something really quite beautiful and delicious. It’s a way of regaining control of the food waste system, and showing that small steps can inspire a pretty big change.

The solution, then, it would seem, can in part come from us, the consumers. By taking personal responsibility and ensuring that we limit our consumption, we can probably dramatically reduce the colossal figure currently hanging over our bagged-salad heads.

While it is endlessly tempting to grab an already prepped salad bag (guilty as charged!) rather than painstakingly select, wash and arrange by hand, the thought of a landfill groaning with plastic might just be enough to change even my rocket-dependent mind. Although, it does occur to me that if I do swap the bistro bag for a romaine, doesn’t that come neatly wrapped in plastic too? What is an eco-conscious girl to do?

This inescapable, plastic-coated dilemma is the icing on the ‘berg of this problem when it comes to salads of all varieties. Yes, food wastage is bad – but I can’t help but feel it’s the plastic that does much of the long-term environmental damage. Putting the ball firmly back in the supermarkets’ court, isn’t it time they offered us a range of leaves that are not coated in cling or covered in some sort of non-biodegradable disaster? It would make shopping infinitely less guilt-ridden.

Our current carefree shopping habits do need some revising. Aside from saving us money, being more discerning about what we buy typically has a knock-on effect in the rest of our consumerist lives, giving us the nudge we need to put a little conscience back into our purchases. It’s certainly food for thought.

 

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