Wasting Food = Money in the Garbage

I received an email newsletter today from the Sierra Club’s The Green Life commenting on last Sunday’s New York Times article One Country’s Table Scraps, Another Country's Meal.

The NY Times article is about the exorbitant amount of food Americans throw away each year. Most of all this wasted food ends up in landfills, and as it decomposes it produces methane, a major source of greenhouse gases.

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With the rising costs of food these days, throwing away food is not only damaging the health of our planet, but is also detrimental to our financial well-being. Learning how to manage and control your waste is no different than learning how to manage and control your money.

In order to learn how to eliminate food waste, you first have to take inventory of everything you throw into your garbage can. By taking inventory, I mean write down on paper every food item you throw into the trash can. Once it is on paper then you will be able to see a pattern to your wasteful ways, and then you can contemplate about viable solutions to be less wasteful.

I have been taking inventory of my trash can for years and always make note of what I can do to control and manage our food waste. By now I know just how much food my husband and I can eat, and never try to make more than we can consume in one meal. I have never been a fan of leftovers.

I only grocery shop every 4 days and plan my meals around buying as few items as possible. For example, yesterday we had Chicken Fajitas for dinner. I bought a bell pepper and onion for the fajitas. But I know from taking many garbage inventories that I will only use half the pepper and onion for the fajitas. If I don’t plan another meal around those items this week, then they will no doubt spoil and end up in the trash. So using the rest of the organic chicken breasts and bell pepper I will make later this week Sweet & Sour chicken, and I will make linguini with white clam sauce using the other half of the onion.

Having only two people in a household you would think that there would be a lot less food waste, but actually two people can produce more food waste than a family of four because it takes longer for two people to eat up certain products. For example, when I buy any bakery products like a loaf of bread, bagels, or English muffins, I always throw them immediately into the freezer, because it may take the two of us a month or two to eat them. If I did not freeze them, then I would be throwing out a lot of stale bakery products and buying fresh bakery items every week.

We really don’t order out much, but when we do, it is usually Chinese food or pizza. We always have lots of leftover pizza, and once again from doing my garbage inventories I know that if I don’t freeze most of the left over pizza right away that it will eventually get tossed in the garbage. I also freeze the leftover Chinese food too, but I have also learned from doing my garbage inventories that we never use the packets of sauces they give you, nor do we ever eat the fortune cookies. So now when we order Chinese food to go, I always tell them not to include the sauces and fortune cookies.

When we have parties, regardless if it is just six people or sixty, I try to have appetizers that won’t spoil quickly in case there is a lot left, and desserts that are easy to cut up into individual slices/pieces that can be frozen and eaten later. I just had a small party last week with out-of-town friends, and I just took a look in my refrigerator to see what I still have left from the party. I had bought a few limes to cut up for bar drinks, and I still have one lime left. Hmmm! What to do? What to do? I’ll be damned if I will throw away one little lime, so I guess I will just have to make some margaritas and go outside to drink and look out at all the stars.

See, these are the sacrifices one must make in order not to waste.