‘I know for a fact supermarkets throw out fresh food and meat that is in date’: chef Conor Spacey on Ireland’s massive food-waste problem

With the average Irish household now binning €700 worth of food every year, the FoodSpace culinary director and author is on a mission to turn us all on to the joys of a zero-waste cooking by showing us how to breathe new life into leftovers and scraps

Culinary director of FoodSpace Conor Spacey. Picture: Steve Humphreys

Katy McGuinness

Do you go to the supermarket to pick up a bag of carrots because you need three for the recipe you’re going to cook for dinner. You make the dish and forget about the rest of the carrots; they sit in their plastic bag in the bottom of the fridge for a week. When you look at them next, they’re a little bit tired, not as crisp as they were when you bought them, and you think, “I can’t be bothered to do anything with them now.”

Maybe you try to ignore them for a few more days and feel guilty every time you catch a glimpse of them there, lurking. But you’re busy. You’re tired. And then, because out of sight is out of mind, you throw them into the compost bin. (Or, worse, the rubbish bin.) While you’re at it, you add in half a loaf that’s past its ‘use by’ date (it looks fine, but better safe than sorry), a bag of slimy salad leaves, a few sprigs of random herbs and that pasta left over from dinner a few days ago that you meant to bring to work for lunch but either forgot about it or didn’t have anything to add to it to make it interesting.