Waste Not

Something happened to our culture somewhere between my grandparents' generation and mine. I can remember cooking dinner with my grandmother watching her scrape the last bit of butter into the pan, parroting that timeless classic, “waste not, want not”. My grandfather too, used to save all sorts of bits and pieces so that when the plumbing broke he would have the piece he needed to fix it. This was normal to me growing up, and yet now anyone of my generation who dares to save things for future use is a hoarder. If you gather fruits and nuts from park trees you're cheap. And if you dry, pickle, can or extract every last bit of useful food, then you're “wasting your time”, because apparently, “time is money”. Well I hate to break it to you, but time is time, and money is money, and frankly, I think time is far more useful. I don't know about you, but I don't get $24 free every day. I do get 24 hours though, and I try not to waste them, just like I try not to waste my food.

There is something you should know about me before we start – I'm Scottish. That means I enjoy porridge, don't mind sleet and snow, love a good misty night, have a fiery temper, and the clasp on my wallet is rusted shut. Living cheaply isn't about having piles of cash in the bank to roll around in once a year, it's about only using what you need, having something to fall back on in hard times, and leaving the rest for others. In hard economic times (and good), when you might lose your job at any time, it's comforting to know that you can live on 10 grand for a year, and that it's really not that bad.

There are 1001 ways to save money, but the topic I'll focus on today is food. You might be wondering why I'm writing about saving money on food for a blog about sustainability, but I've learned something this winter: cheap food = healthy food = eco food.

I sometimes hear people say they can't afford to be green, or they can't afford healthy food, and this puzzles me. The cheapest, healthiest food is that which is least processed: fruits and veges (local and in season are cheapest), wholegrains (barley, rice), and dried pulses. Even if you buy all these at a supermarket, you can still make a stew for under $1 per serving. Granted, organics are expensive, but non-organic produce is still far better than anything processed and packaged. We buy our staple items (grains, flours, beans, spices) at Binn Inn because they're cheaper and unpackaged. Our favourite source of fruits and veges is Christchurch itself. We get about half of our fresh food from our garden, the neighbour's garden, and foraging sites around city (google otautahi urban foraging). The other half comes from a local church's vege co-op. If you don't have access to a co-op, the local markets and fruit and vege shops usually have good prices too. Anything else we need comes from the supermarket, but as their products are usually processed, packaged and expensive we're trying to cut back on what we buy there.

When foraging we often get a large load of one type of food (e.g., apples). We either preserve the produce by bottling, pickling, drying, or freezing, or give it to our neighbour, who in turn gives us all the silverbeet we want and meat from her work (she brings home leftover cuts from work that would otherwise be thrown away). So far this fall and winter we've pickled ginger and cabbage, frozen roasted sliced capsicum, and frozen fruits as we find them for making jam at a later date.

In the developed world we waste enough food to feed every single person on the planet. This is not an exaggeration, if anything it's an understatement. With that in mind, I've been on a mission to use every last useful bit of the food we get. I've dried mint, sage, mandarin peel and lemon peel for teas, and parsley, basil, rosemary, garlic shoots (chive substitute), and celery leaves for use in cooking. Drying plants and peels is easy, I just string them up in a warm, dark, dry place with good air circulation. Our laundry room works well.

I've also started planning meals more carefully so we use up produce before it goes off. If our co-op bag of veggies has leafy greens in it, we use those first to avoid that floppy, limp bit of silverbeet sitting in the fridge on Sunday. Our favourite new uses for silverbeet (in order of preference) include saag (palak) curries, pesto, frittatas, Jan's silverbeet and filo pie, and spanakopitas (tasty, but a lot of work and dairy, so they're a “sometimes food” ;). Fresh inner celery leaves are lovely in salads, and cauliflower and broccoli leaves are great in stir fries within a few days of bringing them home. We don't throw away the dark tops of leeks either, they are full of flavour and can be used in soups if they're going to cook for a while. To keep track of what produce needs using up we've started using one crisper drawer for old produce, and one for new. We also rotate our bowl of roasting veggies so the new stuff goes at the bottom. This way we know exactly what needs using up and can cook appropriately.

Enjoy your dinner tonight!

Laura