Prue Leith: I happily serve guests out-of-date food – young people need to learn to trust their nose

Telegraph

21-02-2025

Are you guilty of throwing away unopened packets or pizza or sushi, full pots of yogurt, ready meals still in their packaging? We Brits discard more food than anyone in Europe, estimated at £470 worth per household every year – the equivalent of eight meals per person per week. Households account for 70 per cent of Britain's food waste. It's criminal. And it seems Generation Z are the worst offenders.
Harvard University has published a study about Gen Z's penchant for throwing perfectly good food away and their reliance on use-by and sell-by dates rather than the tried and tested sniff-test of their grandparents.
Why? Is it just another manifestation of the young's obsession with themselves, along with their health, wellbeing, inner karma and mental welfare? Or is it – as they learnt no home economics or cooking at school – that they just don't know how to tell if, say, an egg is stale (it will float in water), if bread needs binning (hard or mouldy), if a cauliflower or lettuce was picked weeks ago (its stalk will be brown). Not that the brown end will kill you: just chop it off.
They won't know that the mould on the surface of the jam is harmless and just needs scraping off, that a frozen joint looking manky with freezer burn just needs its surfaces trimming, that black bananas (skin and all) whizzed up with milk and cinnamon make delicious smoothies, that shrivelled mushrooms are just half way to dried mushrooms and will be fine when cooked.
They won't know what the great chef Albert Roux said when chiding me in my restaurant kitchen for throwing away the watercress stalks: that there is more flavour in the stalks than the leaves and I should use them for soup. Once, in Covent Garden Market, he got a vendor to give him a crate of positively rotting Charentais melons, squashy and leaking, for free. 'But they are bad, Albert!' 'Non Non, they are perfect. I will make the best sorbet in the world. Come tonight to the Gavroche and you'll see.' He was right, of course.
The main lesson to learn to ensure food is safe is that by and large fresh food doesn't smell and if it does, the smell is pleasant, as with those melons. Bad food stinks. If fish or seafood smells fishy, or meat or chicken smells unpleasant, it's not fresh.
It's useful to know that bacteria doesn't like acid, so sauces containing vinegar – almost all bottled sauces, like mayo or ketchup – will keep for months in the fridge. And anything salted, like bacon, ham, salami, keeps for weeks. And of course the colder your fridge, the longer things will keep. In mine, yogurt stays fresh for a couple of weeks, unopened cream for a good week and butter just about forever. I use the sniff test, not any manufacturer's dates, to check.
Sell-by dates are useful just to know if you are getting the freshest one in the shop. It's sometimes worth reaching for the items at the back of the fridge shelf because that's where the shelf stackers put the newest arrivals.
Manufacturers are anxious not to poison us, so their use-by dates are going to be conservative. Besides, it can't hurt their sales if we chuck out 16 per cent of the food we buy (which we do) because we'll have to go back for more. Retailers love the fact that we shop by impulse, merrily throwing anything that takes our fancy into the trolley, rather than doing as Grandma did and sticking to her shopping list. Mind you, she had time to shop several times a week and knew what she'd cook each day. Our modern shopper stuffs the fridge and everyone eats what they want, when they want.
Few young people will know sell-by dates are a guide, not gospel. If you leave your plastic-wrapped chicken breasts on the back seat of the car in the sun, go to your Pilates class and then de-stress drinking kombucha with your girlfriends for an hour or two, you will have radically shortened those chicken breasts' shelf life. Any microbes originally present in harmless levels, could have multiplied nicely to dangerous levels by the time you get home. Mind you, most food poisoning bugs live on the surface of meat so rinsing the breasts under cold water will wash them off, and cooking the chicken will kill them anyway.
I am too old and too mean to waste anything. Indeed, my husband tells people he lives on leftovers. I just love the challenge of making something delicious and original out of what there is. Last night I jollied-up some cooked chickpeas with leftover spicy lamb stew, two tomatoes and four mushrooms left over from breakfast, half a fresh red pepper and two spring onions, all chopped. It looked great, tasted delicious and cost very little. We eat a lot of trifle in this house – it's the perfect end for stale cake: spread it with any jam or sweet spread, soak it in any booze, cover it with custard (I confess to Tesco's ready-made) and cream. Yum. And I make plenty of instant puddings by layering up fresh fruit, lemon curd, or runny jam with plain yogurt, served in a glass topped with a crushed biscuit for crunch.
My enthusiasm for leftovers even extends to my fashion life. On Wednesday, I was modelling a dress for sustainability designers Vin & Omi, made from recycled plastic milk cartons from the Sandringham estate, and dyed with beetroot and walnut.
I think the secret of being a good left-over cook is to try to use things up as fast as possible. I take some pride in keeping the fridge as empty as possible, and not going on a big shop until there is pretty well nothing left to eat! I do always have good fresh spices and some condiments like miso, soy, sriracha, mustard, tahini and mushroom ketchup to transform fairly bland items, say chicken or fish, or grilled celeriac or boiled eggs, into something completely different. I don't want John recognising last night's supper in tonight's.
But I'm not ashamed of serving friends left-over stuff. Indeed if it's truly delicious I occasionally can't help divulging the provenance of what's on their plate: 'The filling for this pie started life as a Coq au Vin I did for a telly show. It's been in the freezer for two months.' Though mostly I stay shtum. I don't think too many people want to think they are eating hand-me-downs.