Beyond Best Before

What does it matter? Food is food — once thrown, it can be bought again. No one likes to waste food, but many see it as an inevitable and relatively harmless environmental sacrifice. Maybe for this reason, approximately one third of UK residents admit to having thrown food away based on it being past its best before date alone.

The fact is that food waste is actually a significant polluter, with the anaerobic conditions of landfill sites making the natural process of food degradation much slower. The result? Methane, and lots of it. This can linger in the atmosphere for up to 12 years, contributing a huge amount towards overall global gas emissions.

While some food waste is likely due to the UK’s current composting and waste disposal systems, we believe that more can be done to reduce food waste by helping people to be confident in using food past its best before date. Our team, Green Violence, had a conversation about how this could be done, and started discussing the recipes we have all grown up with — each deeply rooted in our respective cultural traditions.

These conversations led to a community lunch where we tried and tasted some of the recipes mentioned in this book, playing with edible paper, eating Oladushki and bread poha, and concluding our lunch with apple desserts done two ways. Best-before-date food became a fuel for connection, change, and creativity.

Now, we want to encourage communities and individuals to appreciate and make the most out of what they have by sharing our recipes, drawn from different cultures and backgrounds.

The team Green Violence hopes that one enjoys using our zine as much as we enjoyed creating it. So, please see it, smell it, touch it — and, just maybe, taste it!