Colm O'Regan: I've saved a fortune with this app set up to reduce food waste

'For one teenage summer job, I sold out of date, smoke damaged, (yes! smoke damaged) Mi Wadi on the Coal Quay.' Picture: Denis Minihane.

Eating food near its best before date: It’s in my DNA. It is now anyway as I wolf down massive cut-price croissants that I’ve rescued from a nearby café at the end of the day. 

By the time I finish the fourth one, the strands of my genetic makeup -cytosine [C], guanine [G], adenine [A] and thymine- have been supplemented with Margarine [M]. This butter mountain is part of my sixth foray into Too Good To Go.

It’s an app which reduces food waste by connecting shops throwing food out at the end of the day with customers “who’d ate anthin at all like”. And that customer is me.

Long ago, my father would arrive home from town with a bounty. Or 60 Bounties rather -in consignments nearly/slightly/solidly out of date chocolate from a cash and carry around the North Main street area. 

54321s, Penguins, Crème Eggs in their hundreds came to the house. Then some gobshite sued because they claimed they got sick even though WE ALL UNDERSTOOD THE RISKS. 

Out of date sweets have a jeopardy. That’s WHY the crème egg was tuppence.

For one teenage summer job, I sold out of date, smoke damaged, (yes! smoke damaged) Mi Wadi on the Coal Quay. And of course, people of Cork went mad for it. I’d be cleaning the soot off and Corkonians would be saying don’t bother.

So Too Good To Go, despite being a swanky app would appeal to a lot people with a horror of food waste and a joy of cheap stuff.

And now on this app, I’ve rescued a job-lot of sausage rolls, pastries and about €40 worth of shopping that I got for a tenner in Supervalu. 

The discount is usually about 70% off and I’m smug with a new story to tell at weddings. The small catch is you don’t know what you’ll get. It’s a surprise.

There is a theme running through a lot of the food. Goodies. And the question is would you buy it anyway at that time?

But say you’ve visitors or some gathering coming up. Something that requires a quick handy infusion of salt, sugar, butter and hydrogenated vegetable oil, nipping off and coming back with a brown paper bag can be a good idea. 

I love sausage rolls but wouldn’t eat six large ones. Not in public anyway. 

But my surprise Too Good To Go sausage rolls from a nearby college canteen were wolfed into their waste-to-energy incinerator metabolisms by the attendees of a small playdate.

On another occasion someone I know fed an entire tree planting group with pastries. The groceries that turn up in the surprise bag mightn’t always be what you’d want but so far we’ve found mouths for them. 

There are ready meals and you can’t eat too many or you’ll turn into a pillar of salt. Some places will include misshapen vegetables so it’s unlikely you’ll get scurvy.

It doesn’t suit everyone. Not every shop or café does this. I cycle to collect my cheapies. 

There’s probably only a certain distance you can drive before the petrol you’re burning to get there is more than the energy wasted from throwing the food out.

But it is a window into the shocking amount of food that gets thrown out. Some big places have teamed up with the wonderful FoodCloud but looking at the piles of stuff that I’ve collected in just six trips, a shameful pile of food and the plastic they’re in is still being dumped by others.

We need Too Good To Go for our fridges. For the red cabbage and green beans we didn’t get round to that is now staring at us reproachfully.

Now, enough talk. Time to eat. What’s on the menu? Surprise me.