Thrifty Chef: sustainable and healthy way to navigate cooking

Have you ever struggled with budgeting, cooking, or just wanted to do something beneficial for the environment? Let me introduce you to a new project on campus - Thrifty Chef, run by two nutrition students.

A meal kit service for students that uses surplus food to reduce food waste alongside providing cheap and simple meals for students. This means that students can afford to eat in a healthy and nutritious way.

One of the problems is that there are a lot of students who often get some sort of takeaway or ready meal, but Thrifty Chef offers a cheaper way of eating, which also has health benefits. As well as this, it teaches people valuable cooking skills. It comes in a recyclable box or bag with a recipe card and all the ingredients necessary for 2 portions of the actual meal, for just £3.

The main aim is to reduce food waste, since the UK produces over 10 million tonnes of food waste every year, which is around 22% out of all the food that is sold. Households have the largest representation with 6.6 million tonnes, making it 69% of the total amount of food waste, according to the BioteCH₄.

Edward Wilkinson, one of the main organisers, said: “I think one of the most important things that we centre around is reducing food waste because it is such a big problem, and so much energy is going to waste by producing the food and then it literally getting chucked into bins.

"I think another big thing for it is to increase awareness of food waste because almost 70% of food waste is in the household, so by increasing the awareness of food waste people will become more conscious of reducing the waste on a personal level, so it’ll help in that way.”

Every Monday morning, they get all the vegetables that would be wasted from a grocery in Heaton and Hector Hall in Granger Market, and with stock of dry goods before Nil Living shut down, they start making a recipe out of it.

“The hard part of it is that we have to sort of come up with the recipe on the day, because we only find out what ingredients we’ll get on the day. So we have to either put them into Google and find some recipes, but usually what happens is we just sort of see a recipe come together as we are both nutrition students so we have quite enough experiences with cooking. We mainly come up with ideas ourselves,“ Wilkinson added.

So, don’t be shy and come along in front of the NUSU, every Monday from 3 until 6, and do something nice for both your body and the environment.