Common sense lessons in saving waste and money

Love Food Hate Waste is the "Waste Not Want Not" of the modern day, providing handy tips, advice and recipes for leftovers to help everyone waste less food. An astonishing 8.3m tonnes of food is thrown away by households in the UK every year; 5.3m tonnes of this is perfectly good food that has just not been eaten in time, or too much was cooked and the remainder thrown away. This is the same in weight as 5,300,000 small cars. Wasting food costs the average family with children 680 a year. It also has serious environmental implications. If every household stopped wasting food that could have been eaten, the CO2 impact would be the equivalent of taking one in four cars off the road.

Love Food Hate Waste focuses on simple, positive, common sense steps to help you eat well, save money and make your food go further – planning meals, checking stocks, building confidence in the kitchen, taking a list when you go shopping, understanding best-before and use-by dates, good storage and portion control.

The campaign was launched at the Sheffield Food & Drink Festival this month and is part of a wider programme of activity.

Love Food Hate Waste will be making an appearance at many of the food, drink and agricultural festivals in Yorkshire over the summer, including; Leeds Loves Food Festival July 1-4, Great Yorkshire Show July13-15; Driffield Agricultural Show July 21 and Huddersfield Food and Drink Festival August 12-15. Alongside these summer events, there is a host of Love Food Hate Waste activity planned for the region over the coming year.

Celebrity chef Nigel Brown has given his backing to the campaign.

"If I can help people really use everything they buy, they can reduce their weekly spend on groceries and eat healthy imaginative meals. It's what our mums and grannies have been telling us for years, 'waste not, want not', it's time we started listening and acting on their excellent advice."

As well as presence at food festival across the region Love Food Hate Waste will be challenging four Yorkshire families to reduce their food waste. The families will keep a food diary for a week and then the campaign will work with them over two months to help them to reduce their waste.

The Love Food Hate Waste Feeds 1,000 – University road-show will showcase the total amount of food wasted by the average family over a year by turning it into the 1,000 meals and feeding this to students. The event will be staged across the region's eight universities over a two week road-show.

Changing Behaviours in Yorkshire's Biggest businesses is another part of the campaign over the next six months.

To find out more about how you can reduce the amount of food you waste visit www.lovefoodhate waste.com