Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is hosting a pop-up café in London aimed at teaching guests how to fight food waste.
It’s one of the biggest crimes of the developed world: throwing away edible, albeit limp, stale or generally sad-looking foods that could have been salvaged with a little creativity and elbow grease.
Guests of The Fresh Thinking Café will learn how they can repurpose some of the most commonly wasted foods — stale bread and tired vegetables — with tips from the celebrity chef himself.
The café is also part of a promotional campaign for kitchen appliance company Hotpoint, for which Oliver is a spokesperson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY1ll-V4pBE
Along with cooking demos and the obligatory selfie with the celebrity chef, guests will dine on meals made from some of the most commonly wasted foods across Europe, with proceeds going to FoodCycle, a charity that also works to fight food waste and food poverty.
By the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization’s estimates, roughly one-third of the food produced in the world is lost or wasted.
The top 10 most wasted foods in the United Kingdom include bread, bagged salads, vegetables, leftovers, fruit, milk, eggs, cheese, meat and fish.
Here are a few kitchen hacks for reducing food waste, courtesy of Oliver:
– To make fresh herbs go further, fill up ice cube trays with herbs of your choosing, fill up with olive oil and freeze.
– Freeze fruits on the edge of going bad and pull them out to make smoothies.
– Reuse old, stale bread in hot soups, or make croutons for salads. Loaves of sliced bread can also be thrown in the freezer and used to make toast.
– Freeze leftovers for weekday night dinners.
– Use leftover or limp vegetable scraps to make a homemade vegetable stock.
Details on The Fresh Thinking Café which opens Oct. 10-11 can be found here. KM
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