Children learn about waste food... and try it for lunch

PUPILS at St Mary’s School in Henley spent a day learning about food waste.

The children were visited by Dean Collins, from the school’s caterer Thomas Franks, on behalf of Surplus to Purpose, a social enterprise which uses supermarket food that would otherwise go to landfill.

He told the school assembly that “surplus” food might be past its “best before” date or had been accidentally damage so could no longer be sold.

Mr Collins said 15 million tonnes of food was wasted each year, which would fill Wembley Stadium eight times or 38 million wheelie bins. Each year group took part in workshops and came up with policies to reduce food waste.

Mr Collins said: “This gets the pupils to go home and challenge their families to reduce food waste as well as making sure they do their bit as a school.

“They have been really positive and remembered all the facts from the assembly, which is brilliant.”

The children also had a lunch made with “surplus” food.

Catherine Yoxall, marketing and communications manager, said: “The children learned about food labelling and the important difference between ‘use by’ and ‘best before’ when considering whether food is safe to eat.

“Our onsite catering team then made a delicious lunch for us all using surplus products and I’m delighted to say that we reduced our wastage significantly.

“I had spaghetti with tomato and roast pepper sauce and it was lovely.

“This will become an ongoing feature in our menus as we continue to educate our pupils and to play our part in helping to address this issue.”

The school council agreed 10 food waste reduction policies, including:

• Regularly check cupboards and the fridge to make sure you use the food that has been there a long time.

• Have a “cooking day” to use everything up.

• Be creative with food.

• Only buy more food once you’ve eaten everything you have.

• Freeze food such as bread to avoid wastage.

• Eat leftovers.

Headmaster Rob Harmer said: “Food waste is something that we can all help to address and I was pleased to hear our children come up with some simple and practical ideas of how they could get involved, both at school and at home.

“We have shared their suggestions with our parents and our catering team and are looking forward to continuing our effort to reduce food waste.”