Tips to reduce Food Waste?

[ml2620]

My husband and I are a bit shocked at the amount of food we waste. We tend to eat out alot because of our work schedules, so when it's time for the weekly search and seizure in our fridge - we easily throw out a few pounds of food that's gone bad - veggies, fruit, leftovers, etc.

How do you manage to reduce your food waste - use what you have, make the most of scraps? I also have no concept of meal planning, so tips on that would be appreciated. We are still meat eaters but have comittied to 4 vegetarian or vegan meals per week.

Any tips or suggestions could be appreciated!

Also, am I missing something or does the forum not have a search feature?

[mikebeavis]

My wife and I have a similar problem, also due to work schedules we rarely eat at a "normal" time and end up with a lot of takeout meals. I have a little garden and I will throw fruit and vegetable waste in there to enrich the soil. Sometimes I throw it behind some trees where I put a lot of grass clippings and yard waste, and once in a great while I turn that pile over to help it become soil. Any breads I will break up into small pieces and scatter in our backyard - it's amazing how fast birds will come to get it. Meats I throw over the fence for any animals that care to take it (I don't want them coming into the yard for it). If milk goes bad I'll return that to the soil too.

I want to get one of those NatureMill indoor composters and then I can do a lot of this inside during the wintertime.

As for re-using leftovers, I am a wiz with the microwave - low power settings often recook food a lot better, I find.

P.S. for apartment-dwellers, you can take your old breads to a park or parking lot where birds congregate and feed it to them there. That's good entertainment as well

[sensiblesustainable]

Meal planning goes a LONG way in helping reduce food waste...it took about 2 years for my wife to buy into the concept, but we have not only reduced our food waste, but our food budget as well. We haven't gone as crazy at 'Monday is taco night, tuesday is steaks, wednedsay is ...', but sometime over the weekend we usually have a conversation of what is going on this week, what is for dinner what night, and what do we need to buy.

I am a big fan of salads...so we tend to have a small salad or so with dinner...and usually take leftover chicken or ham and grind it up to make chicken or ham salad, which I will often take for lunch the next day.

My wife also makes some traditional asian soups on occasion, and we have to eat on that for 3 or 4 days to finish them up, because you can only make it for 12-20 people at a time!

We are both in our early 30's and lead a fairly active social life so I can sympathize with the eating out...

we eat maybe on vegetarian meal a week, mostly by accident...I enjoy eating bambi way too much...

Another book you may want to look for is "how to cook for a day and eat for a month"...

http://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Assets-Deb ... 1891400614

I have not read it myself, but like the concept...


Search button: located on the green bar, just below the grey header....kind of hidden....took me ahile to find it as well

[belandil]

My wife and I rarely have to throw away food. We don't eat out very much, but if we have leftovers from restaurants, they usually become tomorrow's lunch. Leftovers from home-cooked dinners work the same way. We always bring our own lunches to work/school.

Keep bread in the fridge so it doesn't grow mold. If you still have problems, keep a loaf in the freezer and move it to the fridge when your other loaf is gone.

Keep up with what's in your fridge. If you know something will be going bad soon, incorporate it into a meal.

Eliminate garbage by not buying wastefully-packaged items (yogurt).

We also just started worm composting inside. Thus our degradable waste doesn't go to a landfill.

This all said, the kitchen is still our largest source of garbage (even after recycling what we can).

[inkabinkaboo182]

Composting is good for veggies and fruits and coffee grinds and a few other things.

[dasman]

Like one of the other posters, we've set up a worm farm to take care of some of our scraps. We live in a townhouse, so have no yard - it lives in the garage. Doesn't smell, takes care of about 50-70% of our vegie waste and provides great fertiliser for our pot plants.

Of course, it's better not to waste food in the first place (although carrot-ends and the like are kind of unavoidable!) - like you, we're still trying to find techniques that work to reduce our wasteage. But a worm farm will prevent your food scraps turning into methane (which is 30 times as bad as CO2, in greenhouse gas terms) in an anaerobic landfill.

[Whatsyourfootprint]

We live in a small apartment and compost in a large garbage can. It is super easy (especially if you are eating mainly veggie based meals). You can put all of your non-meat/non-dairy scraps in as well as paper towels and even paper shreds from your office…as long as you don’t shred envelopes with plastic windows.

We are already starting to get some pretty good soil and will start a container garden in the next couple of months. The great thing is: we now take out one bag of garbage every other week.

Another thing to think about is to politely refuse all of the extra crap that comes with take out. This only works if you are taking your food home of course. My office does this, caterers are not allowed to bring plastic silverware, disposable napkins, or condiment packets.

http://www.cafepress.com/yourfootprint

[Adz]

Take up most of the suggestions above and you're off to a good start. I've written out a list of what my partner and I do below. I've re-hashed some of the suggestions above and added a few more of my own.

1) Cook more and eat the left overs for lunch or freeze them and have them the next day, or later that week.

2) Be mindful of what is in your fridge and use the things that are about to go off first.

3) Look to see what you already have before you go shopping, so that you don't buy more of what you've already got.

4) If a vegetable has seen better days, but isn't yet 'off', I often chop the bad bits off and use the good bit. It doesn't work for everything, but often a capsicum (pepper), zucchinni, egg plant or cucumber will start to go soft or dry at one end but the rest will be perfectly fine. I used to live with a guy who would throw the whole thing out at the slightest sign of an imperfection. It would drive me mad!

5) Buy less. Aim to shop two or three times a week and buy fewer things. Buy only what you'll need for the next one or two meals. That way there is less chance that it will go off before you get to it. This will work if the store is on your way home and if you don't have to make a special trip in the car each time you go shopping. Otherwise, it is probably better to just shop once.

6) We don't cook meat at home because I'm vegetarian so my partner only eats meat out. If you eat out a lot, you could try eating your meat dishes outside the house and try cooking veg dishes at home. That could cut down on your meat waste, but in reality it might mean that all your meat waste is being transferred to the restaurant/cafe etc. That said though, at least you won't be throwing out steaks that you didn't get around to eating. There is less chance that a restaurant would throw out good meat. They would put it on the specials board and sell it. The other problem you'll have is learning to cook good vego food - but it isn't impossible. We do it all the time.

A few people have suggested worm farms and compost. We use a compost bin because it came with the house, but if I was starting again, I'd go with a worm farm (because they are more fun and less likely to smell). I've pasted some worm farm links below. In Australia some local councils and state governments even give you a rebate in the form of a cheque if you buy a worm farm. My parents who live in Queensland got a $50 check in the mail just before Christmas for the worm farm they bought. Not bad!

http://www.epa.nsw.gov.au/envirom/wormfarm.htm
http://www.sustainability.vic.gov.au/ww ... m-farm.asp

[SteveL]

Not wasting food can make a huge difference, and there is much room for improvement. A 2004 study, from the University of Arizona, found that almost half of all food ready for harvest never gets eaten.

Check out an article I wrote at http://veg.ca/content/view/165/112/. Tips on buying and storing whole foods.

Shop at a place that emphasizes freshness, only buy as much as you need, and store your foods properly.

Good shopping and storage habits help reduce needless waste. Will save you money too.

[Hank Freid]

It’s estimated that some families dispose of nearly 50% of the food they purchase. This seems pretty extreme, but I can imagine it carries some degree of truth.

Most of us can take steps to cut down on the amount of food we waste in our own homes. If you’re trying to eat healthy on a budget, reducing waste and being shop savvy is also particularly important.
Here are the further detail.


>>>Add extra bulk to your meals up by including inexpensive beans, peas, or lentils to stews, soups, and curries. If you have the time, dried beans and peas are even cheaper.

>>>Breakfast cereals can be particularly expensive;
you can
save money by making your own using oats, wheat flakes, dried fruit, sunflower seeds etc.

>>>Cooking in bulk is much more time efficient and cheaper. Try

So using leftovers for lunch the following day, and storing meals in the freezer for another time.

Regards:
Hank Freid

[greenteadrinker]

Green bags will keep your veggies longer,have you tried them? When you make combo meals (using leftovers) and freeze them, make sure you always date the package. As for meat leftovers, do you have neighbors in the area that have dogs? They'd love to have it I'm sure.And if you start composting, no dairy in there.

[ml2620]

One thing I've noticed over the last few weeks is the when we have gone grocery shopping and then come home, wash and cut veggies so that they are immediately ready for use has siginificantly reduced our food waste - and also made us more likely to throw extra veggies into our meals.

The same is true of our meats. While we used to just throw the whole package of meats, chicken or fish in the freezer, we break it down into meal sizes, cut up chicken so it's stir fry ready, etc. It makes our meal prep faster so we are less likely to go out to eat, things don't have a chance to get freezer burned and nasty, we are far more aware of what is in our freezer.

We've also collecting glass jars from family and friends to store all the sliced vegetables in the fridge - but we are still looking for a good eco-solution to our serving size freezer items.

[agraham999]

My wife and I use to go out 4-5 times a week. We're foodies so we love trying new restaurants. But when we started to get serious about our finances and looked at how much we were spending and wasting (one month restaurants+groceries =$1,000) we knew we needed to cut back. That wine sure adds up.



I love to cook, so we started cutting back on going out, and stopped using the convenience excuse once we realized we could whip something delicious up in less time than going to a restaurant, ordering food, eating it, and going home. Besides, we've had many expensive meals that weren't as good as home meals. Plus we enjoy the time together cooking.

As for home waste we do a number of things.

We get organics delivered to our home once a week. Before the next shipment comes we do an audit of all the fruit and veggies left over. If we have a lot of fruit, we bake something (yesterday we made an apple pie), and if we have a lot of veggies we usually make a soup. You can always freeze what you make as well. Another option is just to freeze things like cut apples and other veggies.

As for meat, if I buy a couple of great steaks I won't freeze them, but leave them to age a few days before we eat them. If I have leftovers we'll make a sandwich or use the meat in soup. I freeze all other meat but I think ahead so that I can take it out to thaw before we use it. I try not to use the microwave to thaw meat.

As for a few vegan meals, we have a couple of those a week, but we also think of meat differently when it comes to most meals. We think of meat is as something to accent a meal with and not the focus of the meal. For example, last night we grilled some baby bok choy and then sliced it up and added some bacon. We then had a veggie pizza.

A simple meal with meat might be a little bit of cooked and cubed panchetta with some cheese ravioli and olive oil and lemon. Add some blanched spinach or kale.

Remember you can also freeze things like bread so it doesn't go bad and you always have a few loafs for standby.

We compost our older food and scraps.

We now only go out about 1-2 times a week and our food bill is down to about $600 a month. We also planted a garden this year so we hope to see a further drop in not only costs but waste as well.

I'm going to take a class on canning this year as well

[agraham999]

Like one of the other posters, we've set up a worm farm to take care of some of our scraps. We live in a townhouse, so have no yard - it lives in the garage. Doesn't smell, takes care of about 50-70% of our vegie waste and provides great fertiliser for our pot plants.

Are you referring to plants IN pots or did you mean it like you wrote it???

Of course, it's better not to waste food in the first place (although carrot-ends and the like are kind of unavoidable!)

Actually what I do with carrot tops is cut them off immediately and put them in a vase of water with some flowers. They'll stay green for about a week and are actually very pretty.[/quote]

[rxhybrid]

I just bought a naturemill, and I like it a lot. I made my first batch of compost and it came out really black. I was suprised how fast and completly it composted the items we put into it.

It is easy to use, and there is no odor unless you open the top. When opened, it usually it smells like wet earth or a wet dog, but sometimes you have to add baking soda to sweeten the odor. I have even composted chicken and meat without any rank odors.

My only real complaint is having to use sawdust as a brown item. I haven't found a place to buy it from yet, so I had to order it from naturemill.

I am using the compost on the flowers in my shrub bed. Hopefully it should improve my clay soil. If you have any questions about it feel free to send me a private message.