Get more out of your fruit and veg: eat the parts we often throw away!

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.

Plant-based diets are a problem for bees! A new study of the significance of the ratio of food K:Na in bee ecology and evolution

Week-long Master’s course in Italy – March 2024 – on Pollination as an Ecosystem Service

A “weed” that you should be eating and an introduction to our new garden

1 Reply

It’s been a rather nomadic couple of years. After Karin and I sold our house in Northampton, we travelled around in the UK and then in Denmark, renting places as we needed them, plus we spent a month in Kenya. We’ve now become more settled in Sjælland and, after some deliberation about whether to buy a house or continue renting, we’ve reached a compromise and bought into an andelsbolig, one of the many Danish cooperative housing schemes – see this article in The Guardian for more details.

The development of twenty-eight small properties has been newly built to the highest standards of insulation and is plugged into the district heating system which uses a combination of solar warming and gas (in part using methane generated from food waste).

It’s nice to have a garden again. I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed having a space in which to plant and potter. All gardens present challenges, of course, and this one is no exception. Until about 600 years ago the area was under the shallow Kattegat sea. It’s now above sea level due to post-glacial rebound and in fact this whole region of Odsherred is a UNESCO Global Geopark because of the postglacial landscape.

What this means for us is that we are gardening on “soil” which has a very high sand content and is filled with stones, large and small.

Added to that, we’re in one of the driest parts of Denmark (certainly this year) and a persistent coastal wind rapidly strips the moisture from the soil. So as we dig up or find large stones we are using them around plants to retain water and mulching with the smaller stones that we find in abundance. As yet we don’t have any rain water butts so we’re using the kitchen water from washing up to supplement the hosepipe.

It’s not easy gardening here, but we like a challenge and we’re calling in favours from friends and family to provide us with cuttings and divisions of plants from their own gardens, which should mean that they are better adapted to the local conditions than most of the shop-bought plants. We’ve also started a small vegetable and fruit patch and planted apples and pears around a paved patio that over time we will train as self-supporting espaliers.

Gradually we’ll fill up the space and move things around as needed. But for now I’m also interested in seeing what plants come up spontaneously, especially the annual species that are benefitting from the disturbance. I don’t use the term “weed” to refer to these: weeds are just plants in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many such plants are ecologically important, especially as nectar and pollen sources for bees and other insects. This includes Common Bugloss (Anchusa officinalis) with its richly purple, velvet-textured flowers.

Another plant that we are tolerating is a fast-growing relative of spinach that’s variously called Goosefoot or Fat Hen (Chenopodium album). I’d long known that it was edible (it’s grown as a crop in parts of Asia) but until last night I’d not cooked with it.

In fact it’s delicious! I threw some roughly chopped leaves and stems into a mushroom omelette and I have to say that it was better than any commercial spinach I’ve bought or grown. In particular, the texture is much nicer as the leaves are very water-repellant which mean that they don’t absorb as much moisture during cooking. Highly recommended as an alternative to spinach but make sure you correctly identify the plant before you try it – there’s some good advice on this website: https://www.wildfooduk.com/edible-wild-plants/fat-hen/.

As well as Fat Hen we also have the close relative Tree Spinach (Chenopodium giganteum), with it’s beautiful magenta-tinged leaves, coming up in the garden. I’m looking forward to trying that too:

I’ll try to post more as the garden progresses, if I have time. But as I mentioned yesterday, even though the manuscript is complete and submitted to the publisher, there’s still lots to do on my next book! Have a good weekend.

That’s a wrap! The manuscript of my next book is with the publisher

3 Replies

Yesterday I sent the manuscript of my next book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship to my publisher, Pelagic. I’d promised the full draft by the end of May, and I did it!

But just as when a movie director says “That’s a wrap” at the end of the final day of filming, the hard work does not stop here. Two people have read the full manuscript as I was producing chapters and their suggestions have been incorporated into this draft. The publisher will now send it to a third, independent beta reader and once their feedback has been acted on it will go to a copy editor who will suggest stylistic changes, check for logic and consistency, and so forth.

At the same time I will be choosing which plates to put in the book, which images to use on the back cover, writing their descriptions and deciding where to cite them; checking the sources and further reading sections for each chapter and formatting the references; and producing an appendix that lists the scientific names against the vernacular names that I am using in the book. I also need to finalise the acknowledgements section.

Once all of that is done, the publisher will type set the book and send me the proofs to check. At the same time as I’m checking those I will construct the index, a process which worked well for my last two books, Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society (also for Pelagic) and Plant-Pollinator Interactions: From Specialization to Generalization (which I co-edited with Nick Waser for the University of Chicago Press).

As an author, producing a book is a long process that doesn’t end with the actual writing of the manuscript. It’s incredibly satisfying, however, and working with Pelagic on my second book for them has been a great experience. All being well, Birds & Flowers should be out by early winter.

Now, I have three options for the next book that I’m writing….which one to choose…?

Book review: Everything you hadn’t realised you need to know about houseplants

Insect pollination in deep time – a new review just published

3 Replies

As a teenager one of my main interests was collecting fossils. In search of specimens I wandered for hours, scouring the Carboniferous coal shale heaps and Permian reef outcrops of my native Sunderland. I spent so much time bothering the geology curator at the local museum with my inquiries that he offered to host me for a year as the placement part of my college course. If I had been able to convince my tutors that paleontology was really just biology in deep time I may have ended up as a professional fossil researcher. But it was not to be and instead I spent a (mostly happy) year working in the microbiology laboratory of a local brewery.

My interest in the ecology of the past has never left me, and over the years I’ve contributed a few articles to journals commenting on the latest fossil findings as they relate to pollination and flowering plant evolution. So I was delighted to be asked by Spanish paleontologist David Peris to help with a new review of insect pollination in deep time, led by PhD candidate Constanza Peña-Kairath. That review has just been published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, and for the next 50 days it’s available for free download by following the link in the reference:

Peña-Kairath, C., Delclòs, X., Álvarez-Parra, S., Peñalver, E., Engel, M.S., Ollerton, J. & Peris, D. (2023) Insect pollination in deep time. Trends in Ecology & Evolution (in press)

Here’s the abstract:

Inferring insect pollination from compression fossils and amber inclusions is difficult because of a lack of consensus on defining an insect pollinator and the challenge of recognizing this ecological relationship in deep time. We propose a conceptual definition for such insects and an operational classification into pollinator or presumed pollinator. Using this approach, we identified 15 insect families that include fossil pollinators and show that pollination relationships have existed since at least the Upper Jurassic (~163 Ma). Insects prior to this can only be classified as presumed pollinators. This gives a more nuanced insight into the origin and evolution of an ecological relationship that is vital to the establishment, composition and conservation of modern terrestrial ecosystems.

Pesticides and pollinators: please sign this petition!

5 Replies

As part of our roles as ambassadors of the new conservation organisation Restore (more of which later this year), several of us including Dave Goulson, George McGavin, and myself, are promoting this online petition to get the government to take the issue of neonicotinoid pesticides seriously. Here’s some text from Dave explaining the situation with a link to a petition that you can sign:

“For three years in a row our government has granted farmers special permission to use banned neonicotinoid pesticides on sugar beet. This is contrary to the expert advice of their own Expert Committee on Pesticides, who specifically recommended that permission should not be granted. It also flies in the face of a huge body of scientific evidence showing that these chemicals are phenomenally toxic to all insect life, and that their use on any crop contaminates soils, hedgerow plants, and nearby streams and ponds for years to come. We are in a crisis, with insect populations in freefall. It is about time our government woke up to this, and acted accordingly. This petition https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/631948 is a necessary means of holding the government to account. Please sign and share, as signing will ensure the issue is debated in Parliament.”

This petition now has more than 15,000 signatures which ensures that it gets a response from the Government. If it reaches 100,000 mark, it will trigger a debate in Parliament. Please sign and promote this important initiative!

Announcing my new book: “Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship”

10 Replies

For the past year I’ve been keeping a secret from all but a few trusted confidantes: the subject and title of my next book! My publisher – Pelagic – has now announced it on their website and so it’s time to make it public. “Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship” will be the first book that covers bird pollination in its entirety, going beyond just hummingbirds, sunbirds and honeyeaters, to consider the more than 60 other bird families that interact with flowers, and the tens of thousands of plants that rely on them as pollinators. You can read more about it on Pelagic’s website.

The 3D mock-up of the cover shown above features an illustration by my good friend Stephen Valentine, a very talented artist who you may remember produced this painting of waxwings that Karin bought for my birthday a few years ago. I’m extremely pleased with how Pelagic have incorporated this into the design of the cover.

The book will be available by autumn I hope, if my writing schedule goes to plan!

Pollinators and the UN Sustainable Development Goals – free webinar on Monday!

2 Replies

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about how pollinators can contribute to the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals. It’s a topic that I reflected on in Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society, and I’ve seen a few papers and articles that raise the subject – see here for instance. This free webinar on Monday 27th March is therefore very timely! To register, follow this link: forms.office.com\r\T5HrW0VZvS

Although I’m one of the speakers, I can’t make it in person as I’ve got teaching commitments at Roskilde University, so I’ve recorded my ten minute piece and I’m happy to answer questions via the Contact page on my website.