At Grandma Sita’s kitchen, every day is a day to raise awareness about food loss and waste. We believe that preventing food waste starts with something as simple – and powerful – as changing the way we look at food.
A carrot top, a broccoli stalk, a piece of bread, or a handful of leftover vegetables can all become part of something delicious. With a little creativity, curiosity, and the right cooking skills, what might have been thrown away can find a new place on our plate.
That is exactly what Grandma Sita’s plant-based cooking workshop with food scraps is all about: learning how to improvise, cook with what we have, and discover practical ways to prevent food waste at home. Because fighting food waste does not have to be complicated – it can be creative, delicious, and something we do together. 🌱🧑🍳
📢 Knowledge is one of the keys to preventing household food waste. How much do you really know about food loss and waste? Why does it matter, and what can we do differently? Test your knowledge with the quiz created by the UN Environment Programme 👉 Take the Food Loss and Waste Quiz
♻️🧑🍳 Cooking without a recipe, but with purpose. During this recipe-free cooking workshop, master’s thesis students from the DISIE Thesis Hub rescued surplus food from Too Good To Go’s Surprise Packs and learned how to turn whatever they had into an improvised plant-based meal. No fixed recipe, no food going to waste – just teamwork, imagination, and a delicious way to rethink our relationship with food.
📱 The fruit, vegetables, and bread used during the workshop were rescued from Too Good To Go Surprise Packs, helping us turn surplus food into an opportunity to learn, cook, and take action.
Ready to rethink the way you cook? Grandma Sita’s hands-on workshops invite you to explore creative, practical, and impactful ways to make the most of every ingredient – one meal at a time.
👉 Discover Grandma Sita’s cooking workshops and explore the From Waste to Wow experience.
👣 Grandma Sita Tips: Make the Most of Every Bite
Grandma Sita says: before you throw it away, take a second look! 🌱 Many of the things we call “food waste” can still have a delicious second life. A little planning, clever storage, and a pinch of creativity can help you reduce food waste at home while making your cooking more resourceful.
- 🧺 Buy what you need. Plan your meals before shopping and only buy the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables you are likely to use. And remember: perfectly good food does not have to look perfect!
- ❄️ Freeze before it’s too late. Many fruits and vegetables can be frozen as individual ingredients. Chop them, portion them, and freeze them ready for soups, sauces, smoothies, stews, or your next improvised plant-based meal.
- 🥕 Use the whole vegetable. Before reaching for the bin, ask yourself: Can I eat this part? Vegetable leaves, stalks, stems, cores and trimmings can often be turned into soups, sauces, stocks, fritters, pestos, pickles or crunchy toppings.
- 🍞 Give stale bread a second life. A loaf that is no longer soft can become breadcrumbs, croutons, toast, stuffing, or a delicious base for another dish. Stale does not mean useless!
- 🍋 Peels can be useful too. Citrus zest can add flavour to sweet and savoury dishes, while clean fruit and vegetable scraps that are not suitable for eating can go into your compost. Just remember: not every peel, stem or leaf is edible, so check before cooking.
- 🥣 Cook with what you have. Instead of starting with a recipe and shopping for every ingredient, open the fridge first. Look at what needs using up and let those ingredients inspire your meal. Grandma Sita calls this cooking with curiosity!
- 💚 Store food wisely. Keep fruit and vegetables in the conditions that help them last longer, use airtight containers for leftovers, and keep an eye on what needs eating first. A simple “eat me first” box in the fridge can work wonders.
📗 Did You Know?
Food waste is much bigger than the leftovers at the bottom of our fridge. According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), around 1.05 billion tonnes of food were wasted globally in 2022 – almost one-fifth of all food available to consumers. That is around 132 kg per person, every year.
And households play a huge role: around 60% of global food waste comes from households, followed by food service at 28% and retail at 12%. UNEP also estimates that more than one billion meals are wasted every day in households around the world.
🍎 Fruits and vegetables are particularly vulnerable to food loss. FAO reports that they had the highest global food-loss rate among the major commodity groups, reaching 25.4% in 2023, largely because they are highly perishable and can be easily damaged during handling and storage.
🌎 And food waste is not just a question of what ends up in the bin. When food is wasted, so are the water, land, energy, labour and other resources used to grow, harvest, transport, store and prepare it. Food loss and waste are associated with around 8–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, making food waste an important climate issue too.
👉 Discover Grandma Sita’s cooking workshops and explore the From Waste to Wow experience. Want to learn how to turn surplus ingredients and food scraps into something delicious? Grandma Sita’s hands-on cooking workshops are all about creative plant-based cooking, improvisation and making the most of what we already have.
👣🌎 Grandma Sita Says…
What you eat has a footprint. Grandma Sita makes sure it is tasty, planet-friendly, and cooked with tons of love. Because when we learn to value every ingredient, sustainability can taste great everywhere! 💚🌱