Using Up

Our family enjoys British t.v. shows. One favorite is Pie In the Sky, starring Richard Griffiths, better known as the uncle in the Harry Potter series. Griffiths plays a police detective who would rather be cooking. One of his cookbooks on the show is “Mrs. Beeton’s Family Cookery”, a real cookbook originally dating from the late 1800‘s. We happened to find one on the internet and ordered it. It’s fun reading, especially the part about the art of “using up”. Here in America we call it eating leftovers, something the Natural Resources Defense Council says Americans no longer do. In fact, NRDC research studies report that people are throwing away forty percent of the food in the U.S. I don’t know about you, but I find that rather shocking and disturbing. That means the average family of four throws away about two thousand dollars of food a year. That’s “quite a wake up call”. With today’s rising grocery costs most of us can’t afford to be that nonchalant about wasting food. As Mrs. Beeton said all those years ago, “ Great care should be taken that nothing is thrown away or suffered to be wasted in the kitchen.” Some things should never change.