Waste not, want not

"It’s so simple. It’s so true. It’s so often ignored." Discover

We had a spicy kind of chicken bake when the family came to dinner on Sunday and I made rice to go with it. Since there were ten of us in total, I made quite a lot. Unfortunately I also made some flatbreads and I stupidly allowed my son to suggest I double the number I had prepared. And guess what - all the flatbreads got eaten - well almost all - just a few little pieces were left, but not a lot of rice. So I now have a very large bowl of rice in the fridge. Last night we had a fry up of various leftover things, including the rice - but you wouldn't even know I had touched it. There is still masses of it left.

Now I like rice, and I know that there are a huge number of things that you can do with it, and I'll do at least one more - maybe a biryani, but I don't like it so much that I would enjoy eating it every day this week, however clever one can be with the things you can do with it. I think three meals tops will be it. There are only two of us after all.

So inevitably I think I shall be throwing quite a lot of it away. Now it will go into the compost, so it won't be completely wasted, but it's already causing me to suffer waves of enormous guilt at wasting food. Well almost wasting food.

It's truly shocking how much food gets wasted in the western world. And maybe elsewhere too. People are starving all over the world - even here in Australia, and yet we throw away so much. Yes, there are organisations like Second Bite that do make use of some of it - but I'm sure that health and safety rules would prevent them using my leftover rice for example. Even if there was a simple way of getting it to them. No, it's entirely my fault. I, like many of us in the western world made too much food. Which means that either we eat too much, in order not to throw it away and feel guilty - not good for our health, or we throw away the leftovers - not good for our soul or the planet.

Like many of us I was brought up in modest circumstances - not poverty - and so it was drilled into me to eat up everything on my plate. 'Remember the starving children in Africa' my mother used to say - and doubtless all the mothers like her. I wonder if the children of the rich have this drilled into them too? Do today's mother's say the same to their children?

To a certain extent I can enjoy using leftovers - as I have said many times before. it's a creative challenge. I'm not going to go into what you can do with leftover rice - I think I've done that before anyway. I think my point is that we really should be thinking more carefully about the quantity of food that we prepare, so that we don't, in fact, get any leftovers.

It applies to shopping too. Every time I go to the market, or even the supermarket, I am seduced by all those glorious and beautiful fruits and vegetables and frequently buy too much. Which means that I am often cooking with vegetables that are really past their best. They, like the rice, sometimes end up in the compost bin, which I suppose is OK, but is a bit of a waste of money on my part, and time and effort on the part of the farmers who laboured so hard to get it to the shops in peak condition.

My children left home over twenty years ago - almost thirty I think, so you would think that by now I would be used to cooking for just two. But it seems not. I find it just hugely difficult to cook for two. Especially if the dish is a composed one in some way - a mix of vegetables and meats. For it's difficult to add just a tiny bit of onion, carrot, potato, tomato, capsicum, fennel - whatever. Easy enough if you are just having a steak or some chops, but not for something with lots of different components. And I'm not a good user of the freezer. If something cooked goes in there, it's likely to be completely forgotten and will have to eventually be thrown out. I must buy a fridge that only has a small freezer and then perhaps that wouldn't happen. I dread to think what would happen if I was on my own - cooking for one must be really, really difficult.

'Waste not, want not' is a proverb. There are so many proverbs associated with food - maybe I'll do an occasional series on them. When I was growing up I had lots of proverbs thrown at me by my mother and grandmother, and my younger son remembers my mother quoting them at him. Do people still use them I wonder? Are there new ones? I wonder when people started contriving proverbs? So many questions and no answers so far. Let's just say that it's ancient wisdom that has never been more relevant than today.