Ada Parellada talks about food waste and explains how to avoid it at home
Framed within the Healthy Week, the chef and gastronomic communicator Ada Parellada told in a conference, held in the Aula Magna of the Historical Building of the UB, about the sustainable and low cost meals with season products which we can easily prepare at home. The activity, which gathered more than a hundred people, was organized by the University of Experience and Agrupació Foundation.
Framed within the Healthy Week, the chef and gastronomic communicator Ada Parellada told in a conference, held in the Aula Magna of the Historical Building of the UB, about the sustainable and low cost meals with season products which we can easily prepare at home. The activity, which gathered more than a hundred people, was organized by the University of Experience and Agrupació Foundation.
During the activity, Parellada gave a general introduction about the problem of food waste and said this problem has spread worldwide: “in the developed world, this happens in distribution (because any redistribution process of food is more expensive than food itself), and in the third world it happens in its origins (because, for instance, in sub-Saharan Africa they grow French beans but they donʼt eat them, so they donʼt use all the food they export)”. Parellada gave some significant data, such as how Mercabarna throws 0,5 % out of the total food transactions, or that we should not mistake the expiration date for the best-before date.
“We throw a 58 % of food at home because we do not know how to manage the kitchen”, said Parellada. To avoid this waste, she suggested people to adapt the functioning of restaurants at home: planning a daily meal and have it in mind when shopping. “Once the shopping is done, you need to spend three hours cooking and prepare some storage at the fridge for all the week, which would be a mise en place in a restaurant”, she said.
Ada Parellada (Granollers, 1967) is the daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of the Parellada family, a family with a 200 year tradition in cooking, serving dishes, preparing meals and many events. She is the owner of the restaurant Semproniana (Barcelona) and a well-known person in activities that go far from cooking: waste prevention in restaurants, healhy cooking, campaigns against multiple sclerosis and cancer. In 2016, she was awarded the Saint Georgeʼs Cross for her career in the field of the restaurant businesses.