Love salad and hate waste

As summer arrives, Shropshire Council and their contractor Veolia are backing the Love Food Hate Waste campaign’s call to reduce the amount of fresh salad which gets thrown away in Shropshire.  

When the weather warms up, crunchy mixed salads are an essential component of any healthy meal.  However, in the UK, people tend to throw away half of all of the salad they buy.  Most of this then ends up getting buried in landfill sites at the taxpayers’ expense.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.  Here are some tips to help liven up your leaves and stop them going limp:

• Keep salad fresh in the fridge – break it into leaves, rinse in cold water, dry in a colander or salad spinner and wrap it in kitchen roll before popping in a plastic food bag
• Watercress keeps well stored in a bowl of water in the fridge
• If you’re not a big salad eater, buy Cos or Little Gem because they last well because of their closed, tightly-packed leaves.
• If salad is looking tired and wilted, put it in a bowl of water with a couple of icecubes for half an hour and it will become nice and crisp again. 

And it’s not just the salad leaves which are ending up in Britain’s bins. 

• Last year in the UK, households alone chucked out an incredible £94m worth of cold sliced meat.  To stop cold meat going dry and spoiling, keep it tightly wrapped in cling film in the fridge
• We also throw away £79m worth of coleslaw and hummus every year!  If you can’t eat it all with your salads, then try a dollop or two on a cheese or ham sandwich it makes a delicious filling
• We also chuck 300,000 tomatoes in our general rubbish bins every year.  If tomatoes are past their best for a salad, you can still use them up for cooking, just toss them into a pasta sauce or curry for added flavour.

There are lots more helpful tips like this available from www.lovefoodhatewaste.com to make your food go further this summer.