How Menu Planning can impact the Environment.

The idea with this is that if you are very organised about exactly what you plan to eat in a week, how you’ll prepare it and how many people you’ll be feeding, then you should be able to buy exactly the amount you need. 

The fabulous thing about buying online with us, is that the data around what you buy, when, can be fed through to our farmer network, which in turn helps them plan what they’ll plant, and when they will harvest. That of course then feeds into a system where we can get much closer to guaranteeing them a market for their products.

One of the podcasts features an American CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farmer who was supplying a restaurant with fava beans. The first year she couldn’t bring them enough, so she planted three times the quantity the following season, but the restaurant then only purchased a third of what they had the previous year, leaving her with a massive surplus. When she weighed up the cost of harvest vs the insecurity of a market, she decided to till them back into the soil and plant something else. What a waste! And what a shame! Sadly I think this is true for more farmers than we know, or realise.

And as consumers, we should take our time to think about where we purchase, and what we purchase. When you buy from Greenspoon, we can set up automated systems that inform our farmers of what’s happening on the consumer side, bringing them much closer to the reality of demand. They can plant the right crops, harvest when necessary, and then benefit from fair pay.

Our top tips for menu planning:

• Set aside a day and time in the week to plan. I love doing this on a Sunday afternoon, with a cup of tea and a biscuit, and some great music for company. I do our shop that evening on the Greenspoon app so that everything is delivered the next day ready for the week.
• If you have kids, try to keep things as simple as possible by feeding them roughly the same as you – or make a little extra in the evening that they can have the next day for lunch. We cut out salt for the baby, and limit the amount of chilli, and then when we have the meal we can add separately.
• Mix things up a bit by using different recipe books each week or referring to different websites (ours has a treasure trove of recipes, and it’s growing!).
• Write the plan down on a piece of A4 paper you can put on the fridge door to keep you and the rest of your home on track, and to manage expectations!
• If you have guests coming, think about what you can cook in advance to ensure you have a good time whilst with them!

Top tips for any Food Waste

Whilst we know that when you start menu planning you’ll have a lot less waste, here are some tips for leftovers when you find you do have them:

• Make the freezer your best buddy. Use our stasher bags to put leftovers away in the freezer, so you can defrost them another day.
• Things like leftover veggies can be thrown into a pasta or omelette the next day, or blended into a soup.
• Share any leftovers or potential food waste with neighbours – everyone will love you for it and the favour will come back around one day!
• When you have stale bread, don’t throw it! Make it into a delicious Italian tomato and bread soup or blitz it up into breadcrumbs and store in the freezer for when you need them.
• Organise your fridge! We all have UFOs (Unidentified Frozen / Fridge Objects) lurking; make sure you do a weekly audit of what’s in the fridge, and then try to think of great recipes you can make around those, so that you use them before they expire.
• Remember a best before date is not necessarily an expiry date! Do a quick google search to check on the food safety; many things are perfectly fine to eat even after a BB date.