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Such a waste....
cheryl felix
Posts: 20
in Fruit & veg
Why on earth do people have fruit trees and leave the fruit to rot on the ground? The school next door - our neighbours the other side - the tree at our doctors' surgery - all have apple, pear, and damson trees that crop every year but no-one collects the fruit and it's left to rot. Why not collect it and put it outside for collection, maybe for a charity donation, or give it to the local food bank? Can't stand waste!
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If a thing needs doing, though, best to do it yourself
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
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I offered my neighbour some of my glut of blackberries - she declined as she had no idea what to do with them and didn't realise you could just... eat them.
If you feel able to Cheryl, why not bring the subject up with neighbours,school and surgery? You may find the thought hadn't even occurred to them
. One or more of them may take up the offer of someone else collecting the fruit and disposing of it rather than let it just go to waste.Always optimistic, me 
Last edited: 21 November 2017 15:40:01
Talking of food wastage , there was a program the other night (can't remember which one) stating that approximately 16 million tons (!) of food is discarded every year in the UK alone . This was a result of over-production and 'expired sell-buy dates' , as Philippa points out .
This seems hideous in a world where some are starving ; another horrendous thought was seeing all that needless packaging ending up in landfill sites !!!
. Seems to totally negate our paltry efforts at 're-cycling'!
We have the opposite problem! A couple of years ago the volunteers who look after our local park planted ten fruit trees. Some of them are already producing good crops, especially the pears, but no-one gets to enjoy any of it because it all gets picked before it's anywhere near ripe.
I was watching wartime farm last night (thank you iplayer) and it occurred to me that during the war the WI formed preserving parties where they'd go full bore on the jam making / preserving and put the finished products straight into the rationing system with no personal gain.
I wonder, if we will ever see the likes of this again. Or whether health an safety and food hygiene scare mongering will put people off from doing things like this for their local community.
josusa47, pears are always picked before they ripen, they dont ripen on the tree. I love the wartime farm, I think a lot of us on here would have been great at the digging for victory eh! I have seen various programmes about food waste, Greg Wallace "How to eat well for less" (how can a woman with one young child spend £300 a week on food!!), last night "Eat well good food". I rarely waste any food. Sell by and often use by dates largly ignored, have eaten yogurts,eggs, over a week past their use by, sniff, then taste, only exception is chicken.Even windfall apples are cut up frozen or made into crumbles. Batch made a lot of tomato soup, and pasta sauce this year.Other years its been chutney,jam. As you, say, its ridiculous when people elsewhere are starving, I used to do various donations, but believe now my money went to the corrupt governemtns, certainly not to the people I had intended! But keep hearing on the new,"we have to grow more food in this country for people". I always try to buy british,when I can, because fruit out of season from say Africa is tasteless.
food banks will sometimes only accept food that is preserved (dried, canned, in jars etc.).
In my local area we have a group that collect the spare apples and turn it into cider that is then given back to the apple donors.
As I gave them about 1.5 tonnes of apples (it took them 3 trips in land rover to get them back to their site) i'm expecting a very merry new year - i'm expecting the first batch back mid January.
I agree with NannyB about trying to buy British whenever possible but it leaves me wondering if that is too short sighted when many poorer economies depend on exporting their fruit and vegetables. Having said that I only ever buy British strawberries because imported ones have no flavour and I haven't yet managed to grow sufficient variety to crop all summer.