We love Too Good To Waste

We caught celebrity chef Thomasina Miers on BBC 1 Breakfast TV yesterday. She's owner of the Wahaca Mexican restaurants in London and has thrown her stylish eateries behind the Too Good To Waste campaign.

The campaign was launched by the Sustainable Restaurant Association towards the end of last year and is designed to make diners feel more comfortable about asking for doggy bags or boxes and encourage an increasing number of restaurants to offer them. Celebrity backers of the idea include Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Giles Coren the restaurant critic for The Times, and food writer and broadcaster Matthew Fort.

The doggy bag concept comes from the United States and most of us probably associate it with huge American portions that are just too much to eat in one sitting. But the fact is that for every meal eaten in a UK restaurant, nearly half a kilo of food is wasted – through preparation, spoilage and what’s left behind on the plate. We’re throwing out 600,000 tonnes of food waste from restaurants every year.

Here at Make it and Mend it we launched our Thinking Outside the Bin campaign last week. It's all about the joys of upcycling things that would otherwise end up in the waste bin. You can find out more about our campaign here.

We're all for reducing the amount of waste that finds its way into restaurant bins. How many time have you left part of a delicious meal on a restaurant plate and then suffered an attack of the munchies later? Today's doggy bag is tonight's snack or tomorrow's packed lunch.

BBC presenters this morning were a bit concerned about re-heating things, but as all Make it and Menders know, you just need to follow some common sense rules when making tasty food from leftovers

But perhaps we could come up with a better term than doggy bag or box? What do you think?

You can find out more about the scheme at Too Good to Waste. Sadly their interactive Where to dine map only covers London.

Anne Caborn

How to be an Urban Homesteader

Someone sent us the link to the website Selfsufficientish.com today and we just love it. For a start there's the name. That delightful 'ish' on the end grants absolution to those of us would-be tree-huggers who somehow can't manage to go all the way in embracing The Good Life. Then there's the Welcome photo of Andy and Dave Hamilton, the brothers who established this wonderful guide to urban self-sufficiency. It's the way they are smiling so sweetly while brandishing a fork as if to ward off a Tesco buyer or an advancing flytipper - "One step closer and it's through your throat baby!"

The website is a wonderfully eclectic mix of recipes, tips for living on a budget, a very informative guide to buying your first sheep, and help with growing vegetables and foraging for wild food. They even run courses in foraging - very fortnight in the Bristol area, showing you how to forage, how to identify if a plant is poisonous or edible and lots of facts about wilde foods.

The pair have written a book The Sufficientish Bible. One of our Twitter followers says this is a cracking book - so we are going to get ourselves a copy.

So even if you're a townie, with the Selfsufficientish brothers to guide you, you too can become a foraging, veg-growing, Urban Homesteader. Let us know how you get on - but we advise you not to try the sheep in a one-bedroomed flat...