The zero-waste movement must spread to Australian homes

• Quick kitchen scrap pickle recipe

COMMENT

Upcycling. Closed-loop. Nose-to-tail. The zero-waste movement is one of the biggest trends in contemporary dining, as chefs discover a whole new frugality – not to mention a whole new vernacular – in the cause of securing a more-sustainable future.

Well, it's great that no-waste is so fashionable in restaurants, because it certainly isn't at home.

In most households today, frugality has been thrown out with the asparagus stalks we should have saved to make stock. Australians discard about half of what we eat, and there's no relief in sight. It is estimated the annual cost to the economy of all this waste is more than $20 billion a year, representing 7.3 million tonnes of food. One-third of that waste comes from Australian homes.

Everyone is responsible for food waste, mea culpa and all that. So the other day I did something very niche: I made breadcrumbs from leftover bread, stir-fried wilting lettuce and even (sigh) rinsed the plastic bag the lettuce came in before hanging it on the line for re-use.

In most households today, frugality has been thrown out with the asparagus stalks we should have saved to make stock.

There was more, but I can sense you're drifting off. Because home economics – to use the quaint term – is laborious, repetitive and unglamorous work, and the inconvenient fact is that there are very few incentives left to do it.

Never mind all those magazine articles urging us to make banana-skin tea and use the outer cabbage leaves – the modern world actively discourages us from practising zero-waste.

Assuming you have any time left in the day between longer working hours and commutes, making dinner and scrupulously saving leftovers rewards you with nothing except another meal. No extra pay, no rising status in society and certainly no prospect of ever featuring in the pages of Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls. Where did it all go wrong?

One of the first books to codify recipes was Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book, published in 1604. In those Early Modern times, housekeeping was a woman's job and the responsibility included not just cooking meals, but also keeping track of the household budget. "Receipts" provided a record of ingredients purchased.

Housekeeping is an outdated occupation and has been progressively devalued by society in the centuries since. It became equated with the subjugation of women in the home, for it was, and still is, women who do most of the work in the kitchen.

If one-third of the food we waste in Australia comes from homes, then we can finally place a value on women's work in the kitchen – just under $7 billion annually. It's just a shame we've chosen to find that out the hard way.

But now that we know, what then must we do?

We need to make more breadcrumbs, stir-fry old leaves and hang those lettuce bags out to dry. We need to stop wasting food and plastic. (Although I'm not sold on the merits of banana-skin tea.)

Necia Wilden is a Melbourne-based food writer.