Every week you clean out the refrigerator, and every week you may find some food to throw away—broccoli you didn’t get to eat before it went bad, leftovers from last Tuesday night’s dinner, lettuce that can no longer be revived…
If you are throwing away food on a weekly basis, you are not alone.
According to The New York Times, Americans throw away 27% of their available food. This includes waste from people’s homes, restaurants and grocery stores. Timothy Jones of the University of Arizona, who studies food waste, estimates that the average family of four wastes $600 in food each year. (TLC)
The Financial Cost of Food Waste
Despite this waste, many people complain that they simply don’t have the money to set aside to fund their children’s college education fund or to pay down debt or to save for their own retirement.
How powerful can this extra $600 a year be?
Let’s say you have $10,000 in credit card debt at 12% interest, and you pay $200 a month. If you continue to pay a fixed rate of $200 a month until the card is paid off, you will pay for 5 years and 9 months, and you will pay $3,734.33 in interest. If you take the extra $600 you are now wasting on food and apply it to your debt every year instead, you will pay off the card in 4 years and 3 months, and you will pay $2,669.36 in interest.
Beyond the environmental and moral costs, food waste has a real, tangible financial cost too. Throwing away broccoli that has gone bad is actually throwing away money that you could be using for a better purpose.
How to Limit Food Waste
There are a variety of strategies you can utilize to avoid food waste.
Consider the following:
- Shop only once a week or once every two weeks. Don’t rush to the store to buy an ingredient if you don’t have it. Instead, find a substitution at home. Don’t have green peppers? Substitute red peppers instead. Yes, the taste may be a bit different, but you are using up what you have on hand.
- Buy a combination of fresh and frozen produce. Produce is wasted most often. People have good intentions to eat all of the fruits and vegetables they buy, but they get busy and can’t cook or they forget about the veggies. Instead, buy half fresh produce to eat immediately, and half frozen produce. Then, if you have a busy week and can’t use all of the produce, half of it is in the freezer, where it can be stored indefinitely.
- Shop from the pantry first. Before making your weekly menu plan, shop from home first. Do you have an abundance of carrots that need to be eaten up soon? Make sure to choose several meals for the week that will use up those carrots first. Also, if an ingredient is on your grocery list, first make sure that you don’t already have it at home. I have two brand new bottles of olive oil on my pantry shelf because I forgot to check what I already have on hand.
Wasting food is a cost we can easily avoid. - Use the Internet to find recipes. There are plenty of sites that can help you find good recipes with the ingredients you have on hand. Food.com is a great place to start as is lovefoodhatewaste.com. I recently had 3 pounds of potatoes to use up quickly. I went to food.com and found three great recipes, one of them being Potato Chili. I never thought that would have been a hit at my house, but all three of my kids happily ate it, and we didn’t waste the potatoes.
- Find creative ways to repurpose leftovers. If your family is not fond of leftovers, try to find creative ways to repurpose the food. If you had leftover green beans, why not consider making a chicken pot pie with the green beans inside? Often my kids grow tired of leftovers, but they will eat repurposed leftovers with no complaint.
- Set a grocery spending limit. If you normally spend $600 on groceries per month and find that you are wasting food, trim the grocery budget to $500 the next month. If you have less money, you may not waste as much simply because you weren’t able to buy as many groceries.
Food Waste Hurts
Food waste uses our natural resources and can cause methane emissions once in the landfill. In addition, money that is currently being spent on food waste could be put to much better personal use.
To reduce your food waste, try some or all of the tips above.
You may just find some extra room in your budget and a little less trash in the garbage.
I plan my meals. My roommate is a big food waster and it drives me crazy! Also, I get all my veggies from CSA so every week I know what I’m working with.
One of the ways we were able to cu down our expenses is grocery shopping. Before going to the grocery, I make a list of dish we will be preparing for the whole week, including breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. I buy only the ingredients needed. I also post the menu for the week on the fridge door so that I will always be reminded what to cook. We only eat out once a month, twice at the most, and if there are take outs, we eat them first before cooking anything. This way, we were also able to eliminate food waste.
We try to only purchase groceries once a week and only go to the store with a list of what we need and try to avoid going on an empty stomach. That way we do not purchase too much food and have it go to waste. It has worked well for us so far 🙂
I have been guilty of wasting produce simply because we forgot to use it. One thing I have started to do lately is to cook only enough for each meal and not have a lot of leftovers. Regardless, there are probably people in this world that would be glad to have leftovers. We shouldn’t be so easy on kids who complain about leftovers.
Dear CHANGE
FOOD IS TOO PRECIOUS OF A
COMMODITY TO THROWN AWAY LIKE
GARBAGE.
A call for Federally mandated food
donation laws is essential at this time.
Absolutely 100% of all hunger can be
eradicated in the United States by
making food rescue donations from food
establishments MANDATORY. The issue
of food insecurity is too vitally
important to let this precious
commodity be thrown away
The ONLY answer to the problem of
eradicating hunger and circumventing
current food sharing restrictions
popping up in each small community, is
federally mandated laws making food
donation not a choice but a
requirement. This mandatory food
donation will go hand in hand with
mandatory food give out stations which
will be manned with the same people
sharing food legally and illegally now,
To go after communities about food
sharing is like cutting off the legs of the
spider it is a never ending fight because
the legs just grow back. I do not believe
in fighting or defying I believe in
identifying the problem and solving it.
The problem is people are hungry and
we can’t share food with them legally.
The solution is to make it illegal NOT to
share with the hungry.
I totally agree the problem with
eradicating hunger is not lack of food
but problems in food distribution. It is
for this reason that we are calling for
Federal MANDATES requiring all Food
Establishments to donate all edible food
each day instead of most current actions
which toss this perfect food into
landfills. This takes it from a maybe I
will bother with the trouble of donating
it and easing great hunger-to it is
against the law for me not to donate it
and eradicate all hunger in the United
States
Kathy Mitro kathymitro@yahoo.com
386-795-9643 Daytona Beach, Forida
WHAT CAN YOU DO:
You can give as much media attention to
getting these laws passed as possible.
Voice your support for these laws.
Put this call for mandatory food donation
information on your website.
Post this petition on your website it goes
out to 6 federal agencies that are
responsible for passing bills and laws.
The President of the United States:
REQUIRE all food establishments to do food
rescue each day – Sign the Petition!
Talk this up to as many people as possible
we are planting a seed for these laws to
grow around.
Give me your written support and I will
post a list of endorsers on the petition
website
I am available at any time for any type of
media exposure internet, newspaper
television. I can be contacted at numbers
included in this email.
THIS IS TOO EASY AND TOO SIMPLE OF A
FIX TO OVERLOOK.
THE SIMPLICITY OF IT IS SHEER BEAUTY.