10 Easy Ways to Reduce Food Waste

TheDai­ly­Green is a really good web­site on sav­ing the envi­ron­ment. And I found this cool arti­cle about how to reduce food waste.

While we think that food waste is organic, biodegrad­able and will rot in a land­fill, I found out about a month ago while talk­ing to a Land­fill Expert I was work­ing with that in fact, the garbage in land­fills take a really long time to decom­pose. For food to com­post prop­erly, it needs light and air. In the land­fill, it has nei­ther. Instead, food devoid of light and air pro­duces methane gas, which con­tributes to global warming–unless you make use of that methane, like power for exam­ple. So if you really want to help the envi­ron­ment, maybe you can start at the source–by reduc­ing your food wastes.

Through poor por­tion con­trol or buy­ing too much fresh food that goes off before we use it we cre­ate a lot of waste. Fol­low these tips to help you reduce food waste, save money and pro­tect the environment:

1. Write a list!
Menu plan your meals for a week. Check the ingre­di­ents in your fridge and cup­boards, then write a shop­ping list for just the extras you need.

2. Stick to the list!
Take your list with you and stick to it when you’re in the store. Don’t be tempted by offers and don’t shop when you’re hun­gry — you’ll come back with more than you need.

3. Keep a healthy fridge.
Check that the seals on your fridge are good and check the fridge tem­per­a­ture too. Food needs to be stored between 1 and 5 degrees Cel­sius for max­i­mum fresh­ness and longevity.

4. Don’t throw it away!
Fruit that is just going soft can be made into smooth­ies or fruit pies. Veg­eta­bles that are start­ing to wilt can be made into soup.

5. Use up your left­overs.
Instead of scrap­ing left­overs into the bin, why not use them for tomorrow’s ingre­di­ents? A bit of tuna could be added to pasta and made into a pasta bake. A table­spoon of cooked veg­eta­bles can be the base for a crock pot meal.

6. Rotate.
When you buy new food from the store, bring all the older items in your cup­boards and fridge to the front. Put the new food towards the back and you run less risk of find­ing some­thing moldy at the back of your food stores!

7. Serve small amounts.
Serve small amounts of food with the under­stand­ing that every­body can come back for more once they’ve cleared their plate. This is espe­cially help­ful for chil­dren, who rarely esti­mate how much they can eat at once. Any left­overs can be cooled, stored in the fridge and used another day.

8. Buy what you need.
Buy loose fruits and veg­eta­bles instead of prepacked, then you can buy exactly the amount you need. Choose meats and cheese from a deli so that you can buy what you want.

9. Freeze!
If you only eat a small amount of bread, then freeze it when you get home and take out a few slices a cou­ple of hours before you need them. Like­wise, batch cook foods so that you have meals ready for those evenings when you are too tired to cook.

10. Turn it into gar­den food.
Some food waste is unavoid­able, so why not set up a com­post bin for fruit and veg­etable peel­ings? In a few months you will end up with rich, valu­able com­post for your plants. If you have cooked food waste, then a kitchen com­poster (bokashi bin) will do the trick. Just feed it with your scraps (you can even put fish and meat in it), sprin­kle over a layer of spe­cial microbes and leave to fer­ment. The result­ing prod­uct can be used on house­plants and in the garden.