There’s a frequently cited statistic that one third of the food produced for human consumption is wasted every year. That waste occurs for a variety of reasons, including spoilage, over-production and inefficient processing methods. This has clear environmental (and therefore human) consequences, for example in terms of increased carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas production; excessive use of fertilisers and pesticides; unsustainable water extraction; and conversion of natural habitats to farmland.
Much of the wastage occurs before the food ever reaches shops and markets, so individual consumers have little control over the waste, other than to try to pressure business and political leadership into action. However, we can all do our bit when it comes to reducing food waste in our home, which has positive impacts on our health and our bank balance.
When it comes to fruit and vegetables, we in the west often throw away perfectly edible parts, I suspect because it doesn’t fit with our expectations of what the food “should” look like. A good example is radishes (Raphanus raphanistrum subsp. sativus) where it’s not uncommon to discard the perfectly edible leaves. People who grow them often pull out plants that have flowered, despite the fact that the seed pods are delicious and arguably nicer than the roots, as I discussed in this blog post from a few years ago.
There’s lots of other examples like this, one of my favourites being the crunchy central pith that you find in the thick stems of broccoli (Brassica oleracea var. italica). I love it raw and it has a flavour quite distinct from the normal part that we consume.
It was only quite recently that Karin introduced me to the fact that the mature pods of peas (Pisum sativum) are also edible, if you know how to process them correctly. If you eat the pod as it is, the texture is tough and stringy and not very pleasant. But if you carefully peel away and discard the thin inner membrane of the pod, the remaining flesh is sweet and delicious. It’s fiddly and takes a bit of practice. The easiest way is to gently snap one corner of the half-pod and peel from there – see the example third from the top in the accompanying photograph. Below that in the photo is the thin membrane, which can be put into your food waste or composted, and below that the edible portion of the pod.
Karin and I just eat this raw, but no doubt you could add the pod flesh to any number of dishes. If you have children or grandkids, set them the task of removing the membrane in one piece – it’s not easy!
Please leave a comment below and let me know your favourite bits of edible fruit and veg that are normally discarded.
Prof. Jeff Ollerton - ecological scientist and author 
Good to see that you are publicising this as it is a particular bugbear of mine, that so much is thrown away just because people do not know how to prepare and eat fresh *living* fruit and veg these days. I could keep you going with stories to fill volumes! The main enemy is the chiller-killer that ensures that very often, even your winter hardy broccoli comes frozen to death, to ensure that, if you have no room in the fridge, it will rot as soon as it warms up! Otherwise growing stuff like celery heads, cabbages, spring onions, beets, will keep growing in water till you’re ready for them. Even the few items that are ‘ripen at home’–like the one variety of leathery skinned dark purple plums ‘Angelino’, that is all most superstores sell–are usually part frozen and rot long before the two months it typically takes for any survivors to get ripe! Peppers, which are only sweet and ripe when wrinkly and soft aand dark coloured, are usually chill killed and turn to water and ruin your wooden fruit bowls as soon as they warm up and all the bruises develop!
For now, here’s a couple of tricks: tasty flesh that is difficult to get at because of fibres like your pea pods, is best got at by fermenting. Pea pods make exceptionally good wine like champagne, and you can get at the juice by chopping them and softening with a bit of boiling water before adding yeast and a bit of sugar to start it off. After a few days, the woody parts are floated to form a crust that you can lift off, and you are left with a fizzy drink you can enjoy as is, or carry on fermenting into champagne. This technique is best of all with rhubarb. The strings of rhubarb make it hard to separate juice from solids, but, if you chop it and simmer in just enough water to stop it burning, before adding sugar and yeast, the strings are lifted by the bubbles to form a fairly dry crust on top after a few days, and can be lifted off the gloriously delicious pink fizzy juice! And: if you are lucky enough to have elderflowers just coming to petal fall stage in your garden–which is naturally timed to go with the rhubarb–you can twirl the umbels inside a muslin bag or sock etc so that you just catch the corollas, and leave the cat pee smelling green parts behind to give you the berries later. A tea cup of the corollas is enough for an excellent gallon of rhubarb and elderflower champagne, which is much better than any ‘real’ champagne I’ve ever wasted my money on!
Better still: you can still use the strings of the rhubarb to make crumble, or add to breads and cakes. Once reacidified and sweetened it tastes just the same as if you hadn’t already had the juice, and probably is more nutritious now full of yeast! As you are a lab person, you may have a big Buchner funnel and vacuum filter flask handy, in which case, you will find that you can get the max juice out of the fruit pulp by cutting circles from felt type kitchen cloths to put over a fast filter paper before putting the pulp on top so it doesn’t immediately clog the paper. At home, where most people won’t have an electric vac pump, you can use a hand pump of the kind sold amazingly cheaply with car brake bleeding kits. Get some thick walled silicon rubber tube to join it to the flask, and seal your funnel to the flask with a piece of inner tube much better than any bung. My latest refinement, is to put a piece of cling film loosely over the top of the Buchner and pulp, so that as you pump the air out, the cling film is sucked down and squeezes from the top while the vac is sucking from the bottom. You’ll be amazed how much juice used to get thrown away with the ‘lees’, or ‘spent’ fruit pulp, for want of a way to extract it!
One more tip: fruit needs to be alive and free of places for air to get in, in order to keep it till you are ready to use it. Air usually gets in around the stalks of avocados and mangoes, and turns them black from the stalk end before they are ripe. Stand these fruits in suitable cups or supermarket humus containers etc, with the stalks under water, and, so long as the stalks weren’t already loose (look for crack round the stalk, and for weeping in mangoes), they will still be green inside a month later. Actually, the avocados stay green skinned where the skin has been under water, so, next batch, I’m going to try the whole fruit stored under water till wanted… One caveat: this may work with many reasonably thick skinned fruits, but some, like plums and gooseberries, will burst in water, and promising looking papayas (that usually are best on the inside when they look throw away on the outside) dissolve their own skin with their enzymes if you try this trick with them.
I have plenty more, but for now just a pet current peeve: loads of otherwise sensible seeming YouTube ‘creators’ are being ‘sponsored’ by sellers of a modern version of a perpetual motion or free energy device, called an ‘electric composter’. This looks like a breadmaker, and delighted housewives are shown putting perfectly good veg into it to ‘turn into wonderful compost in only 4 hours’, even with all the bug killing heating and drying that actually would inhibit composting, they still show that you have to also buy some magic powder to go with it! All to ‘save you a trip out to the compost heap’! It really angers me how these firms are using funding seeking YouTubers to shill this antisustainable energy and space wasting junk, and how many are falling for it! They even get scientists and lawyers who specialise in giving true facts, to break into their serious information, to wax lyrical about this con! I can’t believe my ears when I hear otherwise credible and qualified conscientious people turn into snake oil sellers without even breaking the flow of their delivery! There must be better ways to finance people who are trying to counteract all the fakery, than for them to be roped in by yet more fakers!
Sorry for rambling, but you hit a nerve! 🙂
No apology necessary! Some great ideas in there, many thanks.
Incidentally, Jeff,
I happened to be reading about favism yesterday, and came across mention of this ‘Persian Hogweed’, that I’d not heard of before, but it might be headed your way as an invasive. You might like to look out for it to mix with broad beans, so says Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleum_persicum?wprov=sfla1
Thanks, that’s a new one for me too, I will check it out.
Thanks for the article. I’m a fan of beetroot leaves, plus the nice little leaves around a cauliflower; radish tops definitely (best fresh and young). Possibly my favourite is turnip tops – really good strong flavour, and they don’t seem to get attached as much as other greens in my garden (NSW, Australia).
Thanks Alison. Yes, all of these brassica tops are edible, and of course beetroot is just a form of chard, so it’s a tragedy to throw them out!
If these greens and haulm veg have not been frozen to death, you can get more greens from beets, turnips, swedes, radishes, etc, just by keeping them in a bucket in the bath. The cabbages and celery in particular, make more roots that you can pot up for more if they don’t get infested with the pests that come in with them. (Celery is nearly always rotten in the middle, but you can separate the good stalks and they will root in water.)
Most roots have been wash and chill killed and go slimy after a week in the ‘crisper’ in bags, but ones that haven’t been ‘washed’ fare better. Most remarkable is horseradish root (much better freshly grated than any ready made jars of). This stays alive for years in the fridge if it hasn’t been badly bruised in digging it up. I’ve had roots that I grated down to the top over a couple of years, and then planted the top and it still grew!
Unfortunately, due to the pests that come in on the veg, it’s a bit of luck when you get to keep them for long indoors, as it’s almost impossible to beat greenfly or thrips without destroying the plants too.
I lost all my chili plants last year because someone gave me one with greenfly on and they just seem to materialise out of nowhere as soon as the flower buds form. I almost believe the greenly genome must be part of the plant itself!
Coconuts usually taste of soap and have grey flesh, because, when the eyes start to dry, air gets in between the inner skin and the shell. Eventually you end up with a foul loose grey ball inside the shell. If you are lucky enough to get a really fresh one, you can keep the eyes under water as with avocado stalks. (There is a case report of a man being killed after taking a mouthful of coconut water from a ‘drinking’ coconut that had been in the fridge too long. Even though it tasted awful and he spat it out, the toxins could not be neutralised. Since reading this, when I have more coconut than I can eat, I cover it in Bacardi! 🙂 ).
It’s really annoying that stores now sell most greens, watercress, rocket, as just leaves in plastic bags full of nitrogen, that look fresh and alive, but have been chill killed, and just turn to water even unopened if you dont eat them right away. Some stores have even started taking the leaves off the beets and selling them separately. Particularly annoying is the turning of kale from a tastier alternative to broccoli, complete with stalks, to a super expensive fad where just the least developed bits of leaf are bagged up and there isn’t even enough for one serving once cooked! I used to rely on going to the Indian greengrocers–of which there are many competing here–to get proper whole and alive fruit and veg, in great variety, so it feels extremely limiting now I have to rely on online superstores that all sell the same handful of things.
You can avoid the disappointment of expensive bags of watercress turning to water before you want to eat them, by putting nasturtium seeds to grow up your tomato plants, or put seeds in any of your houseplant pots, to grow up the plants as extras. The whole plant tastes exactly the same as watercress, the flowers are the tastiest bit but so beautiful it feels a crime to eat them. The round leaves are perfect for bagels, to stop things falling through the hole! 🙂
If you have indoor plants, beware pineapples with the top growth on. I have been fighting a losing battle with chili thrips that I’m sure came in on the crown leaves of cheap pineapples from Costa Rica. If you unpick the crown leaves, you will nearly always find borings right through to the growing centre, where you can often spot tiny grubs as their eyes give their near invisible bodies away. As the growers have already tried every pesticide on the crops, there is no way you can control any infestation that comes out of these! I lost all my indoor plants bar the Jade Plants after leaving one of these pineapples in the fruit bowl without taking the top growth off and binning it. And even microwaving the compost for several minutes doesn’t work: whatever you plant in it gets eaten as soon as the leaves get green. You’d think the thick wax on Jade Plant leaves would deter the thrips, but, once all the other plants have gone, craters start appearing as they get in when the stomata open. Luckily, these plants are stout enough to keep in the bath and blast with the shower every day till you’ve washed off all the crawlers, but there will be a new batch from the compost to need spraying again next season! Horrifically damaging creatures!
You’ll also find there are bugs–mostly dead from Bt toxin but not always–under the calyxes of peppers and chilies. It really is a minefield out there!
If you are growing seeds from your shop fare, chillies are easiest, and stand up on their own, and you can put lED lights on them at Christmas, or string up the chillies as decorations. I like to open the citrus fruits and pomegranates into orange and pink stars, for decorations and beer mats too. To open them, just think of the flower, and score with a razor blade, from stamens to near stalk, and open out. (This is the only way to get pomegranate aryls out successfully: smooth round, shiny pomegranate is no good despite what the best before says. Wait a month or two until the rind has shrunk onto the placentas and you can see bumps where the aryls are. By this time, the fruit looks like you need to take a spanner to it! Then cut round the opening and lift it out so you can see the membranes between the placentae. Then score down the outside over the membrane ‘spokes’, and open out into a usually 6 pointed star, and ease out the jewels–when really ripe they often fall out. The placentation isn’t always regular, but you can always get ripe fruit like this, even if your kitchen does gain a few pink spots!
Sharon fruit of Kaki persimmons always have stupid best befores on. Ignore them and wait until you can easily unscrew the calyx and lift it out to spoon out the inside when it is a delicious sweet jelly. This can take as long as three months! (old style ones used to have shiny black seeds in them that could get stuck in some people’s throats, so always watch out for them. I like the way the Sharon fruit version has a perfect Maltese cross inside! 🙂
I have eaten a delicious pea pod soup. In Iran young broad beans are cooked and eaten whole. Amelia