Camping, trench foot and falling into a wheelie bin

Kate Hughes is plumbing new depths to sort out the family’s food waste

Spoiled food due to missed deliveries often goes straight to landfill (Getty)

In some ways, ending last week upside down in a stinking wheelie bin was inevitable. Like the rest of the country it seems, I took the kids to Cornwall for the weekend. And also like the rest of the country, we camped. Camping or, if we’re feeling flush, self-catering means we can control the waste we directly and indirectly produce – or don’t – far more easily because we can feed ourselves in exactly the same way as we do at home.

And at home, we’ve found that the key to eliminating throwaways, particularly plastic packaging on food, is to make everything from scratch – and I really do mean everything – using local, seasonal ingredients.

Blah, blah, blah. All of us have heard this chat before – mostly from the posh lot wandering about in farm shops on random Tuesday afternoons clutching wicker baskets before parting with more than my monthly mortgage payment for ‘a few bits’.

But if you do it right – and by that I mean buy ingredients in bulk, take your own containers to refill everywhere you go, massively cut back on the meat, fish and dairy, and purchase from real life retailers and wholesalers as opposed to wafting around aspirational focal points – it can save a fortune.

Contrary to popular belief, I reckon cutting out the plastic – and the pre-prep and packaging middlemen that come with it – has cut our shopping bill by more than a third since the days of the kitchen bin. It does up the labour intensity though, there’s no getting away from that.

Which is why instead of packing wellies, raincoats and, more hopefully, the kids’ sun hats at midnight last Thursday (why is it always midnight?) I was making bread. And snack bars. And pasta sauce. And peanut butter (roast them if you can be bothered before blitzing in a food processor with a bit of salt and a couple of tablespoons of oil, I guarantee you’ll never go back to the palm oil laden stuff.) And marshmallows for toasting around the campfire in the drizzle.

Have you ever made marshmallows from scratch? By one o’clock on Friday morning I’d remembered why I’ve made exactly two batches of the damned things in the four years since we went zero waste. What a pain in the backside.

They don’t even go crispy when waved at a roaring inferno by a four-year-old. They sort of shrug as if to say “I’m not sure what you’re trying to do” and wait to inflict third degree burns on the unsuspecting.

With them safely stowed, we arrived in a damp Cornish field, clinking furiously over the grassy tufts thanks to a boot full of jars and metal containers. It has become the soundtrack of our lives.

We spent three days making the most of the gaps in the torrential rain, accumulating nothing more than compostables. And possibly trench foot.

Most holiday spots don’t seem to offer composting facilities though – presumably because we’re collectively crap at it. For some reason we can’t quite manage to separate the organic matter from the non–organic and no campsite or self–catering staffer needs the nauseating job of going through the rotting food waste on a Monday morning checking for plastic.

As a result, the waste people create while they’re away from home is even more likely to be a combination of stuff that goes straight to the incinerator or landfill. That’s pretty tragic because the anaerobic conditions in the average rubbish heap mean food waste breaks down to produce, among other things, methane – a greenhouse gas 28 times more damaging than carbon dioxide.

If you want to do one small thing to reduce your environmental impact, separate your food waste like your life depends on it.

I’m a total pedant for minimising food waste (and the grocery bill). You clear your plate in our house, end of. I will also cart my composting home with me rather than putting it in a general bin.

I fully admit to being the crazy aunt who comes barrelling through the front door after a holiday with a dripping cardboard box destined for the compost heap, while everyone else lugs in more conventional luggage.

Not last Sunday night though, because this campsite was one of the few that provided composting. Relieved that I wasn’t going to spend the entire length of the M5 with the windows down and the kids complaining yet again, I set about collecting up what food waste we had with gusto.

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of peering into the wheelie bin provided for the job before joyously hurling in the apple cores et al. There, on the top of the heap, was our nemesis – cling film. Otherwise destined to contaminate the whole batch, I had to get it out.

Let’s just say my five-foot-nothing stature doesn’t lend itself too well to the dimensions of a wheelie bin, especially one that’s nearly empty. But at least that particular unadulterated batch is now destined for greatness rather than garbage.

That’s what I told myself as I picked bits of banana skin out of my hair, anyway.

Next time... glitter gladiators and sequin showdowns