5 Easy Ways to Reduce Food Waste in Your Home
While it may seem fruitless (ha) to try and reduce food waste in your own kitchen when the scale of environmental issues is so large, there are some significant benefits to your home and community when you think and act critically about your household food waste.
Food that is edible and thrown away wastes money and space. Think of the Tupperware you couldn’t get yourself to clean out or the precious cabinet space taken up by food that will never be eaten. Below are some tips and tricks (some of which we expand on in other articles) to help you reduce food waste in your home!
1. Shop Smarter
We tend to buy more food then we need and we are often aspirational in our purchasing choices. When you can taking smaller more frequent trips to the grocery store can help reduce how much food you buy. Make a habit out of using all the food you have before purchasing more.
Use lists and meal planning to target the items that you really need. Apps like Big Oven (free), Forks Over Knives ($5). Plan to Eat (free and paid version), can help you build shopping list based around recipes.
2. Learn to Preserve
Pickling and fermentation have been in used for thousands of years as ways to preserve food. Canning, freezing, drying, all these methods can be used to preserve food and have it last longer. If you have fruit trees in your neighborhood, a small garden, or a farm share this methods can be an easy way to help save cost and maximize your food.
Preserved food is also excellent to have on hand during emergencies.
3. Store Food Correctly
Many households do not store food correctly. If you’ve noticed your food gets ripe a little too fast and before you can eat it, it’s ready for the trash, this might be you.
There is produce that should be refrigerated and some that should never (items like tomatoes). Many foods are kept longer if they are in the dark. And also there are many foods that produce ethylene that can cause other foods to ripen quickly (this can also be useful to get that perfect avocado!). You can learn more here!
4. Keep your Fridge Organized
When it is hard to see and find things in the refrigerator it’s hard to remember to use them. Restaurants and grocery stores use a method of food storage called “first in first out.” So instead of pushing older items to the back of the fridge, bring them to the front and put newer items behind them. This is also a good storage habit for your cabinets and pantry space.
5. Make a Smoothie or a Broth
Use the ends, peals, and bones of food to make smoothie’s and broth! The trimmed ends of kale and the tops of beets and strawberries are excellent additions to smoothies.
If you cut up veggies, save the scraps in a bag in your freezer. Use those scraps to make vegetable stock or add the bones and skin from a rotisserie chicken to make chicken stock.