HealthOnTrack

Frozen food can be a great way to store excess food and saves having to make daily trips to the store. We’re not talking about pre-packaged frozen food products in the form of frozen dinners, but rather frozen items that one would ordinarily use when cooking.

It’s quite remarkable how much food goes to waste in the UK every year. It amounts to approximately seven million tonnes at a value of about twelve billion pounds. On average just under seven hundred pounds worth of food ends up dumped in the trash, which could mostly be avoided if the right food was frozen in the right way. The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) estimates that if food waste was prevented it would be equivalent to removing one in five cars from our roads. There is a considerable amount of energy and resources, from cost of frozen distribution to milk pasteurization, which ends up being wasted when perfectly good food is left to go bad and subsequently discarded.

There are ways to save money and the environment by making sure food is frozen at the right times. Firstly one should plan meals for the week ahead. This way it avoids you having to take a trip to the shop everyday (which has other environmental consequences). The Department of Agriculture in the United States has decaled that, save for eggs and the can in which tinned foods are stored, mostly anything can be frozen.

Although you wouldn’t initially find fruit frozen in storage and chilled couriers delivering it in that form, but this food group does last longer if frozen at home and anything goes except pineapples and bananas. Lettuce is often the root of waste problems, so if you plan to use often in the following few days then you’re set, otherwise it’ll go to waste rather quickly. Food that is no longer frozen should be refrigerated at a temperature of 5 degrees or colder.

The benefits of frozen food include saving time, money and environmental damage, whether it is already in the form of frozen meals, or you have taken the initiative in freezing it yourself.