On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:55:25 +0000, K wrote:

I'm trying to educate my son at the moment. He cooks well from a recipe,
but doesn't yet have the knowledge and confidence to make up his own
recipes, and you need to be able to do that to use left-overs. So far I
have just got him trained to leave me all the bits, even if he thinks
he's taken everything that is edible.

That knowledge and confidence will come. As with most things not
being scared of making a mistake is half the battle. Your son is
lucky he has someone who can cook to teach him, I have feeling that
an awful lot of households now rely on ready meals or takeaways. The
kids won't have seen their parents doing anything more complicated
than poping something in the microwave. We cook from ingredients
almost every day, the frozen pizza does comes out occasionaly but
even then gets bits added to it.

We generate one small worktop compost bin of food waste/week, that
includes the things that occasionally make a bid for freedom from
the
fridge or vegetable store. The average household thows out about
1/3rd of the food coming in, edible and inedible (peelings, skins
etc). I don't know how such households manage to chuck out so
much.

The statistic includes such things as banana skins and used tea bags.
That explains some of it!

I was including the inedible skins and the stuff that hasn't been
consumed before becoming a new life form in our small bin/week
amount. No way is that 1/3rd of all the food coming in for family of
four/week. It's rarely full and has several inches of paper shredings
in the bottom as well.

If the average is 1/3rd there must be a lot of people binning 1/3rd
of their food.

--
Cheers
Dave.