Mayor of London and top chefs launch food recycling campaign

Published by Jon Land for 24dash.com in Local Government and also in Environment

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, today joined forces with Gary Rhodes, Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall (pictured), Oliver Rowe and other top chefs to urge Londoners use tasty leftovers for great recipes, rather than throw away perfectly edible food.

The expert chefs have contributed mouth watering and imaginative recipes – including a lemon potato mash cake - to the Recycle for London campaign and are designed to help use up the food Londoners are most likely to chuck in the bin, such as bread, meat, fish, rice and potatoes.

These recipes are featured on the Recycle for London website, which will be updated with the best recipes and top tips submitted by Londoners in the coming months.

With a third of London's food currently being thrown away, the message is that by making food go further, Londoners can save money, help the planet by cutting carbon emissions and sending less food to landfill, whilst also enjoying new dishes and rediscovering old favourites.

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said: "Londoners chuck away a mind-boggling amount of perfectly edible food, some of which could instead be used to make a great tasting meal.

"It is high time we treated that lonely dish of marooned mashed potato or plate of rice relegated to the back of the fridge with the respect it deserves. It makes sense for your wallet, as well as for the good of the planet, to make your food go further.

"A huge thank you to London’s leading chefs for sharing their amazing recipes and I urge Londoners to send us their top tips to make the contents of our fridges feel loved."

Chair of London Food, Rosie Boycott, said: "There is a growing reawakening of how important a resource food is and where it comes from. Not only are there huge benefits from producing more locally grown fruit and veg, we should also value the food in our fridge. This only needs a bit of forward planning and a few basic stock cupboard items to bring a dish together from almost anything."

Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, said: "There’s enormous satisfaction to be had from getting the very most out of every ingredient, coming up with ingenious ways to serve leftovers and finding new recipes to use up a glut of fruit or veg.

"Approach your store cupboard and fridge with an open mind: could that chunk of stale loaf become a bread and butter pudding? Might those softening apples be pureed for a sauce? ‘Waste not want not’ isn’t some dreary, outdated mantra, it’s a principle that can help all of us eat wisely and well."

The site – www.recycleforlondon.com - features recipes from the following top chefs:

Phillipe Castaing – Mamina’s bread cake
Stuart Gillies – roast chicken and mashed potato; risotto balls
Shaun Hill – cromesquis; fish stew with garlic, saffron and chilli
Gary Rhodes – bacon soup; pork and peas risotto; shepherds pie
Oliver Rowe – spiced lamb meatballs with bread and mint salad
Cyrus Todiwala – egg and vegetable fried rice; fofos de arroz
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall – roast potato gnocchi; mixed meat ragu; leftover lamb and spelt salad; eggy bready pudding with rhubarb compote; Tim's lemon trickle mash cake

UK households throw away a whopping 6.7 million tonnes of food every year. That’s around a third of all the food we buy. If we stopped wasting food that could have been eaten, it would have the same impact on carbon emissions as taking one in five cars off UK roads as well as saving cash off the weekly food bill.

In London alone, we know that food waste generates 6.3m tonnes of greenhouse gases every year, making it a significant contributor to climate change. But much of that food is wasted - to give an idea of the scale of the problem, it is estimated that Londoners throw out 400,000 untouched apples and 750,000 slices of bread every day.

In addition to today’s campaign, the Mayor and Rosie Boycott launched Capital Growth in November last year to boost the amount of food grown locally in London.

It has an aim to create 2,012 new food growing spaces by 2012. More than 100 spaces have already been identified to date including along British Waterways canals and a plot outside London’s City Hall.

The Mayor is also determined to untap the potential in our food waste through the London Waste and Recycling Board working in conjunction with London’s councils. The Board aims to spend £31 million over the next three years on projects to boost the conversion of food waste into an eco-fuel.