More than 99 per cent of salad offered as an accompaniment by takeaway food establishments is never eaten, with many thrown into waste bins unopened.
According to the waste management firm that conducted the research, Business Waste, public waste bins near some curryhouses and takeaway kebab shops are often filled to overflowing with bagged salads as customers dump them at the first opportunity.
Mark Hall, of Business Waste, said: 'We tried to find out who eats these salads, and we found literally nobody prepared to confess that they did. In our opinion, they're nothing but a huge waste of food - thousands of tons going to waste.'
The firm asked nearly 1,500 takeaway food customers at several locations in the UK what they did with free salads given away as an accompaniment to curries or kebabs. It found that:
- 56 per cent of respondents throw the saladin the bin without opening it
- 30 per cent put it in the fridge, and throw it away later
- 14 per cent leave it in the shop or give it back to the delivery person
- 0 per cent of respondents eat the salad
Business Waste puts the reluctance of many people to eat salads from takeaways down to the mistaken perception that there's probably something wrong with it, or that it has been prepared in an unhygienic kitchen.
'A plastic bag's probably not the best way to present a salad, to be honest,' Hall noted. 'Customers have a mental image of the food being stuffed in there by bare hand, which it most certainly isn't. But it's a hard image for most people to shake.'
However, that reason was the one most heard by Business Waste when it asked customers why they avoided takeaway salads, with respondents nothing:
- 'I don't know where it's been'
- 'I've been told that it's dirty/out of date/they don't wash it'
- 'I might get food poisoning off it/I heard somebody gotfood poisoning off it'
- 'I hate salad'
