Teaching children to cook could cut UK’s £12bn p.a. food waste
The absence of cooking lessons in schools is contributing to the £12bn worth of food thrown away each year by UK households, according to a leading adviser on food waste. Liz Goodwin, who until last week was CEO of the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap), said that reductions in waste had plateaued after falling by a fifth over the past decade. Wrap has now decided to target specific demographics, including environmentally-aware young people who lack essential cooking skills, and single people. Goodwin also called for continuing pressure on retailers – who create just 1% of the UK’s food waste – to improve food labelling.

A failure to teach children to cook at school is one of the reasons to blame for UK householders throwing away £12bn of food each year, according to a former leading government adviser on food waste.

Liz Goodwin, until last week chief executive of the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap), said that while avoidable food waste had been cut by a fifth in the past decade, reductions had stopped.

That has led the agency to target specific groups of consumers, including a younger generation that cares about the environment but is busy and has little time to meal plan, and lacks basic cooking skills.

“We’ve probably got a couple of generations who went through school without really getting taught how to do things [cooking skills and home economics lessons] and then they’re terrified by use-by dates: one minute to midnight it’s OK, a minute after midnight it’s not OK,” she said.

“My view is that not teaching children how to cook will undoubtedly contribute [to food waste].”

Another group in the agency’s sights is “young single people who don’t really care”, said Goodwin. “The only thing that’s going to get through to them is a technological solution – they basically don’t have a relationship with food, they eat food to do other things.”

Older, more settled people who did not live through the second world war but had families who did were less likely to waste food, she said. More than half of all food waste in the UK occurs in households, at a cost of £700 for the average family annually, with the rest elsewhere in the supply chain.



Wrap says food waste has been cut by a fifth in the past decade - but the reductions have stalled. Photograph: Nick Ansell/PA

Public awareness campaigns by Wrap have seen avoidable household food waste cut by 21% since 2007, despite government cuts to the agency’s budget from £37.7m in 2011 to £15.5m for the last financial year. But the reduction in food waste had “undoubtedly plateaued”, Goodwin said.

“That could be a mixture of things, either we’re getting more affluent again, coming out of recession, or we’ve done the easy stuff and it’s now getting harder, or we’re not keeping the profile of it high enough, or a combination of those things.”

Previous research by Wrap economists found that about half of the reduction in food waste after the 2008 financial crash was due to the recession and the other half down to people changing behaviour because of awareness campaigns.

Early findings from research by Wrap in South Africa suggests that as the country is becoming more affluent, food waste has rocketed, she said. “As the world gets a growing middle class and becomes more affluent, it could become a problem [growing food waste in households],” said Goodwin.

Although retailers are only directly responsible for about 1% of food waste in the UK, Goodwin said there was still progress to be made on labelling. While sell-by dates, a stock control device, have been phased out, best before and use-by labels can bamboozle shoppers. “It’s getting better but people are still confused by the two dates,” she said.

Some products have a use-by date when they don’t need one, Goodwin said, citing hard cheddar – “if it gets a bit of mould, cut it off, it’s not going to kill you” – and some orange juices. Research by Wrap has found there is around a day’s safety margin built in to use-by dates as companies have to factor the margin in because they don’t know how quickly food will be refrigerated after it leaves shops.

With a growing population, Goodwin said food waste was still a very important issue and could not be allowed to go on.

“I do think there’s a moral case [to save food waste], because we have to think about food security, not just for the UK but internationally. If we stopped wasting as much food in the UK [as we do] we’d be able to feed the growing population in the UK without having to increase productivity or import more.”