Many of us will now have been cooking and eating primarily at home over this past year because of the Covid-19 restrictions. While this encouraged many of us to discover new recipes, and even allowed us to share time with family or with friends on Zoom while cooking or baking, there is an element to food consumption that may have had a more negative impact – food waste.

SCoJeC, in partnership with Jewish communities across Scotland, has been hosting the Scottish Jewish Climate Network, and, with the help of its committee, the third event of the series, Love Food, Hate Waste, focused on the environmental impacts associated with preventable food waste and on how to reduce it.

For this event, we teamed up for a Zoom seminar with Changeworks, Scotland’s leading environmental charity, which aims to reduce energy and fuel poverty, and household waste, as well as promote carbon reduction across Scotland. Their environmental consultants Kathleen Vaughn and Angela Mitchell outlined the sheer mass of food waste each individual contributes in the UK a year. Participants in the seminar were invited to answer questions such as "to freeze, or not to freeze?" and many were surprised to learn that even herbs such as basil can be frozen for future use. Click here to read the Changeworks presentation.

The discussion was also an opportunity for participants to share their own experiences of planning food preparations during Covid, and encouraged us to think critically about how to shop smartly in order to waste less. We found that there is always a way to save food items from being thrown in the bin, whether that is by donating them to a local charity, saving them for sharing with local wildlife, or freezing them to be eaten another day.

We have a number of other exciting seminars and discussions planned to help educate Jewish people in Scotland about how to help promote change and have a positive impact on the environment, starting with a seminar on energy waste in the new year.