5 Simple Ways to Cut Down on Food Waste
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save money, and help save the planet.
It is so easy to waste food nowadays. Big sales on items you think you’ll eat, only to try it once and then let it mould in the fridge. Forgotten items stuck behind containers of sour cream. Too many leftovers and not enough time to eat them. Ordering out when we just don’t feel like eating what’s in the house. What happened to eating what you have? Planning out meals (much different than meal planning…), and buying only what you needed? Food waste happens to the best of us, but you can cut down on how much you’re throwing away — and hopefully save you some money in the process.
Organize your fridge
This is the biggest food waste problem for my home. My fridge is rarely empty. It’s stuffed with food and a few choice beverages, but worse, we have every single sauce known to man. At least, it feels that way. We love sauces and dipping, but we also just haphazardly throw the bottles in the fridge, shoving them anywhere they can go. Which means that some of our more perishable stock gets stuck behind sauces and containers and whatever else.
Organize your fridge into sections. For us, one half of a shelf is devoted to sauces and sour cream and the like. Maybe a bit ridiculous for some, but it’s definitely what’s needed for us. Your fridge doesn’t have to look like a low-waste Pinterest fridge with everything perfectly lined up in containers and colour-coded, but it can probably look better than it is.
Devote specific sections to specific foods. If it’s empty, don’t stick anything there just because you can. Re-arrange, if necessary, but keep each section open for what it’s meant to hold. This should keep you from finding those leftovers you swore you put away right after dinner….three months later.
Do the same with your freezers. While we eat mostly from our freezer as we buy our meat straight from the farm, we can still lose food in the freezer. New items from the store, boxed up and easy to throw into the freezer, often hides a lot of things like frozen veggies or cookies that I made on a baking binge. Freezers can be trickier to organize, but taking inventory and marking it off whenever you use something can be a real food saver.
