Food resilience, and reusing all food scraps, go hand in hand, ensuring no nutritious resources end up in landfill and potentially saving you money.

This Food Recovery Hierarchy illustrates the most to the least sustainable ways to reduce or get rid of your food waste

Here are great ways to reduce food waste:

Reduce at source: The Love Food Hate Waste website lovefoodhatewaste.co.nz has some great tips on food storage and recipes for left overs.

Sharing with others: Share with neighbours or deliver non perishable food and fresh produce to one of our pātaka kai (community pantry)-outside Mulberry Grove and Okiwi Schools, in front of the community gardens at Medlands, at Anamata (where a new and improved pātaka kai is in progress) or canned food can be dropped off at the airport.

Feed animals or compost: We are lucky to have room at most properties on Aotea to safely return food scraps to the soil to feed plants. If you’d like to learn more about composting you can get in touch with Caity Endt, our Food Resilience coordinator, for tips and tricks or look up the Compost Collective website for information.

Don’t have a home compost?

Deliver to a community compost bin at Medlands Community Garden and Mulberry Grove School, or Anamata. Anamata accepts all food scraps (during open hours), others may limit the type of food scraps they accept eg to vegetables.

Return to the soil without composting:

Bury fish and other food scraps near a tree or in a garden to let it break down and release nutrients and organic matter to feed soil and plants.

Purchase a Greencone biodigester to install in a sunny, easily accessible spot in your garden. These are designed to take up to an icecream container of food waste a day, any and all food scraps; they don’t attract wild or stray animals eg rats, mice and pigs and they wont smell if not overfilled. Anamata has more information about them or you can find information about them online.

Use Sharewaste.org.nz which connects people who wish to recycle their food scraps and other organics with their neighbours who are already composting, worm-farming or keep farm animals. It enables you to divert organic material from landfill while getting to know the people around you! Check out the website and join up if you are interested in receiving or delivering organic waste for someone else to use. Wouldn’t it be great to have a network in each of our communities eg Mulberry Grove, Claris, Okupe, Okiwi, etc of receivers and disposers of food scraps.

If you have other creative ways to manage food waste, please share or get in touch with the Anamata crew and they may share it.

Words by Anamata