Stop Food Waste
Image via Wikipedia One thing I really HATE to do is throw food into the rubbish bin. It’s a waste on many levels.
- A waste of money spent buying the food in the first place.
- A waste of my time shopping for the food.
- A waste of valuable resources tied up in growing/making, packaging and shipping that food.
- A waste of space when it gets added to landfill (not to mention the methane gas that is produced as a result of rotting food).
According to an article put together by Notebook magazine, “Australians are throwing out three million tonnes of food every year. That’s equivalent to 145 kilograms of food waste for each Australian.” I suspect figures in other western countries would reflect a similar level of wastage.
I find it positively scary the amount of rubbish going to landfill as a result of the food we eat (or don’t eat as the case may be).
Here are a few more staggering statistics when it comes to food wastage*:
- In Victoria and South Australia, 40 per cent of what people throw out is food.
- In Sydney, some bins contain up to 50 per cent food waste.
- Every single day, Britons throws away five million potatoes; one million slices of ham; four million apples; and seven million slices of bread.
- Australians are wasting $6 billion worth of food each year!!!!
* source: Notebook magazine
What Can We Do To Stop The Waste?
1. The Buck Stops Here
A global issue like this still comes down to the individual. I know I can do better when it comes to reducing how much food wastage we have. What about you?
2. Spread the Word
Notebook Magazine are having an ongoing campaign to encourage people to cut back on their own food wastage.
Those of us who are bloggers can do our bit by writing about this issue and sharing our ideas on how we can all reduce our food waste.
3. Share your ideas here
I’d like to write a follow up article next week sharing as many ideas as we can come up with. So place your ideas in the comments section here and I’ll compile them together into what could become a very handy resource for saving us all a few dollars as well as helping the environment.
If you have any good recipes for using up leftovers, I hope you’ll share those too. Feel free to email them to me (lightening at lighteningonline dot com) or share them on your own blog and let me know the link so I can link to it in my follow up post.
All recipes and tips shared will go into a draw for a free Notebook magazine. And if you submit them here as well, you might win some free Tupperware.
To Get You Started
Here are a few ideas from me to get those creative thinking caps working:
- Menu Plan. This is possibly the most logical step when it comes to reducing waste. Menu plans help you use up what you have as well as making grocery shopping easier. You tend to buy what you actually need rather than guessing at what you’ll need. As much as I hate doing it, menu planning is an excellent way to cut costs in the grocery department.
- Adequate Storage. Understand what foods need to be refrigerated or frozen, what foods should be kept out of the light and so forth. I LOVE my Tupperware for reducing my food spoilage rates (and yes, you can still order through my party although only in the next 24 hours).
- Planned leftovers. We actually don’t have a lot of meal leftovers, other than when I’m choosing to stretch meat to a second (and sometimes 3rd) meal. On the occasions when we do, Farmboy and I tend to eat them for lunch (in fact, I don’t think we have enough leftovers for Farmboy’s liking at times).
I will post a couple of my own recipes when I write my follow-up article.
POLL: What Happens To Food Waste In Your Household?
Please take a moment to participate in the following poll on food waste:
Loading ...Let’s all do our bit to help reduce food wastage. Don’t forget to leave your tips in the comments section below.
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Food wastage?! HA!
Peelings go in the compost, any leftovers get used the following night/given to the chooks and what the chooks don’t eat gets eaten by the wild birds or the possum mafia
Cook less, buy less, freeze food in smaller portions, mix appropriate leftovers into pet’s food (saving on pet food), buy less pre-packaged food and cook more from scratch.
We don’t have a great deal of food waste at our place. Thus I ticked “It goes in the rubbish bin”.
Why does it go in the rubbish bin?
Well the only food I throw out tends to be
1. the food on the girls plates they did not eat.
2. seriously rotting food, which we have very little of as I have worked out all sorts of tricky ways to use up food before it gets to the really off stage - most of which involve baking it into bread, my hubby will eat practically anything if it is in a slice of bread
3. Potato peelings, apple cores, fatty bits off the meat, bones etc. All those scraps.
Related to point 1. the food on the girls plates they did not eat.
I give the girls small servings so that if they are not hungry there is little to throw out. They are welcome to seconds but must eat what they have on their plate first.
I refuse to eat their leftovers, it is not a good habit to get into for many reasons.
We don’t have much of a garden or anywhere for a compost bin - let alone a spot to put the compost. I’d say this is where our biggest offense is - I can not recycle potato peelings etc into the compost. That is a problem relating to high density living I think. Some local councils now let you put compost type food waste into your green plant matter recycling bin but ours has not done that as yet. On a good note our local council has expanded the variety of things we can recycle in our yellow plastic, papers and cans bin so that is good.
Sad to say but our rubbish bin is mostly filled with broken toys, bits of stale playdough, the non recyclable food wrapping.
We try not to waste food in our house.. it is too expensive to waste. But I admit that sometimes I don’t plan so well, or the kids ask for food and don’t eat it…. At the moment that is what we are working on, trying to explain to the girls about wasting food and finding a balance between allowing them access to food and not having a million half eaten biscuits!
We have very little food wastage around here. For starters DH eats just about anything, so if the kids can’t finish their meal - he finishes it. I don’t actually consider peelings etc “waste”. The skins from onions and bananas etc are not meant to be eaten! (They do end up as chook food though). I also started serving smaller portions. If we are still hungry after dinner / lunch, we eat fruit or cereal or toast.
We have only very little food waste. I cook large quantities, then freeze meal-size portions, so nothing “goes off” in the fridge and has to be thrown out. We don’t eat fresh veggies, we buy snap-frozen, which means there’s no skins or waste to throw out with that - every bit of the food gets eaten, and nothing goes mouldy if we don’t eat it quickly. Our apple cores get thrown into the garden to decompose.
I think a big part of it is knowing how much or how little to buy and cook in order to feed your family. If they don’t eat it all, freeze it for another day or an after-school snack. If you know you won’t eat a lot of fruit, don’t buy a lot. It’s really quite simple.
Heh, this is something I’ve been working on for the past two weeks. I’m still throwing away food but a lot of it was in my fridge and already bad….
Things I’m doing are:
- A weekly menu plan (although during the week this gets chopped and changed around according to what I actually feel like that day)
- Writing use-by dates in permanent marker on the container and then having those dates face me. So for example tonight I am making a pizza because I know the tomato paste will be expiring soon and I need to use it up. And I know because every time I open the fridge the date is there in big black numbers!
- Slowly starting to work my way through the freezer so I don’t end up throwing stuff out because it’s been in there for ten years
Via this method I have saved half a pumpkin, yoghurt and will be saving the tomato paste…plus fruit and some veggies and that’s just in the past two weeks! Even better is that I’m eating some interesting meals again.
Lightening - HI!!!! It’s been ages. Sorry for being away for so long….there’s been holidays and knitting, and sewing and knitting…and treatment for knitters addiction….
Food waste only happens here when I don’t MENU PLAN. Knowing what’s for dinner (sometimes lunch) is essential at least two days in advance. When the system falls flat here (which given my current attachment to knitting, it seems to on the odd occasion), that’s when we see food wastage.
Having said that, we have four composting sites going, creating topsoil for our vegetable gardens. Things like half eaten porridge/weetbix, rice etc gets given to the pooches. The only food waste that gets chucked is citrus & onion waste.
Still, this is a reminder to refocus on the planning.
Lisa x (ps. loved the tractor photos. Boys are such boys at field days aren’t they!)
Shocking food wastage going on here. Not all the time, but often enough. Trying to cater for L’s moods and keep him happy and fed ain’t easy. Sometimes The weeks flow by with me buying, cooking and US eating, then he’ll hit a rough patch and all plans are out of the window. He doesn’t like me buying as it “costs too much”. He doesn’t like me cooking, “it stinks up the place” also creates too many dishes which need washing. He wants me to cook proper dinners (huh?), but make enough so that we can heat up leftovers the next day. Fair enough. Next day comes and he’s “not in the mood” for whatever was leftover. We’ll “have it tomorrow”. HAH! It gets tossed. Then he’ll settle down again for a while…
Good for you for doing this. Notebook asked me to as well, I just don’t have the time. It’s one of my pet peeves too.
Menu planning has to be The. Single. Biggest. Thing. that stops as much food being wasted in our house.
The other one is really simple - Freezing the leftovers instead of putting them in the fridge. Like the leftover meat off the chook, or popping leftover soup, spaghetti or whatnot into meal size freezer containers and popping in the freezer for either DH to take to work or for anyone to have on a FFY night or a hot snack/lunch.
I usually eat leftovers for lunch over the next day or two, but if it’s something that I don’t eat or more than enough for one, then it will often sit in the fridge till it needs to be tossed. Freezing our leftovers in meal portions makes much better use of them and ensures no waste.
I’ll join the chorus of those who love menu planning - it has definitely cut down on food waste in my house. Plus, we’re pretty cheap and are always trying to use up our leftovers. We usually have leftovers for lunch everyday and if anything is left at the end of the week we try to eat it up over the weekend. Some things we save to throw in soup like rice, pasta, veggies, etc. Also, my two dogs get the benefit of left overs, so not a ton of food going into the trash over here.
We eat it up, freeze it for later, etc.
I have four kids, and my daughter’s boyfriend lives with us, so I’ve been used to feeding 7 people for years. Well, now my daughter is on Weight Watcher’s, my oldest has moved out and the two younger ones are on work/school schedules where they don’t always eat with us. (My youngest is 18.) It’s been hard, but I’m getting better at only cooking for two or three. Meantime, the biggest thing I can do to reduce food waste is to make sure any leftovers get into the freezer within a day or two. For instance, last night I made steak with teriyaki sauce. Only my middle son, my husband and myself were around for dinner. So today, I’ll cut the leftovers into smaller pieces and freeze them for use in stir-fry!
So, I guess what I’m saying is that we really have to think ahead. I try to remember to ask who is going to be ‘around for dinner’ before I thaw anything out. That way, I don’t end up with enough for an army when I’m only feeding the color guard, LOL!
We have a new rule in the house now (since a month ago). Because I got tired of being the only one who clean the ref, I told hubby and a nephew to eat everything they get from the pot, get only as much as they can consume, not to place any left-over in the fridge that will only end up spoiling, and to eat only what is available at the moment. So far, the ref’s still clean and less cluttered.
Whenever there is a leftover, say chicken, or beef, I cut it into dices and saute with plenty of onions and garlic, season with soy sauce and lemon juice and ground pepper to top some toasted bread.
This is an eye-opener post, Lightening.
Thanks to your global concern.
Good post. We’ve been trying to be better, but we trash too much stuff. I’ve started to buy clothes at a resale shop so we’re not paying to generate new “stuff”. I also try to buy marked down produce at the grocery store (that is still good) so it doesn’t end up in the trash and I save money too!
I too hate food waste and agree, when I menu plan, I have a lot less, if any. I also like to give things away to my neighbor when I know I won’t use it and it will go bad.
We have a worm bin and they turn it into great soil. You can’t feed them meat, grease, oranges, or onions though.
Great ideas everyone. Will be working on my follow up post in the next day or so. Stay tuned!!!
It feels really great when you know that food wastage awareness is taken seriously around the world . When we think we come up with many ideas which can be useful for everyone . good job everyone and hope this continues and helps more people!!! BRAVO and BIG THANKYOU!!!