Four millions Christmas dinners wasted each year

Over four million Christmas dinners are thrown away every year.

New research found the equivalent of 263,000 turkeys, 7.5 million mince pies, 740,000 portions of Christmas pudding, 17.2 million Brussel sprouts, 7.1 million pigs in blankets and 11.3 million roast potatoes are wasted by people.

It’s prompted social impact company Too Good To Go to launch their Great Christmas Fruit and Veg A-Peel, urging everyone to use up all their leftovers to help create a sustainable festive season.

The initiative includes a list of top tips on how to best use unwanted food, and we’ve compiled the top five here:

1. First up is the Potato – the OG of Christmas dinner, our roasties are always hallowed ground, but that often means we can end up with too many left over. To reuse your roast potatoes, you could mash them and top a hearty shepherd’s or fish pie. You could also kick off Boxing Day with a tasty batch of potato pancakes by whisking your mash together with flour, eggs, baking powder, chives and milk.

2. Sprouts – controversial for some, but the humble brussels sprout makes a delicious pesto if you add garlic, lemon juice and your choice of toasted nuts. Alternatively, pick up some leeks in your pre-Christmas shop to rustle up a tasty leek and brussels sprout gratin.

3. Oranges and Lemons – a top tip that future you will love is to freeze any leftover citrus peel from your Christmas cake and desserts. Put your feet up until Easter comes round and you can defrost them to make delicious hot cross buns!

4. Roasted Veg Peel – something else that you can make from your Christmas Day feast leftovers is vegetable peel seasoning. Just coat your discarded peel with salt, pepper, herb stems and olive oil and roast for about half an hour at 150 degrees centigrade. Once they’re suitably crispy, pop in a food processor with whatever spice you like and you’ll end up with homemade seasoning that will keep in an airtight jar and be added to any number of dishes in the future.

5. Carrots – if you’ve got a mountain of peel from all those carrots for Rudolph, what about creating a Zero Waste Carrot Cake instead of chucking it out? If you combine carrot peel and grated carrot with flour, sugar, eggs, oil, sultanas and a bit of mixed spice, you’ve got a fantastic extra dessert to serve up between Christmas and New Year.

Too Good To Go is a certified B Corp social impact company that connects users with partners to rescue unsold food and stop it from going to waste. With 100 million registered users and 170,000 active partners across 19 countries across Europe, Australia and America, Too Good To Go operates the world's largest marketplace for surplus food.

Since its launch in 2016, Too Good To Go has helped to save over 350 million meals from going to waste, the equivalent to avoiding 945,000 tonnes of CO2e, 283.5 billion litres of water use and 980 million m2 of land use per year.

According to Project Drawdown (2020), reducing food waste is the number one action you can take to help tackle climate change, by limiting the temperature rise to just 2˚C by 2100