Save money and resources by wasting less food. Stop wasting and start being resourceful now with these 6 easy ways to reduce your family’s food waste!
Ways to Reduce Your Family’s Food Waste
Wasting food is always a bad thing. Not only is it bad to let good food go to waste when so many people in the world don’t have enough to eat, but it’s also bad for your budget! If you know your family needs to reduce how much food goes to waste, then you need to read these 6 Ways to Reduce Your Family’s Food Waste!
6 Ways to Reduce Your Family’s Food Waste
1. Have an “Eat It Up Day” – A really easy, and potentially delicious, way to reduce your family’s food waste is with an “eat it up day.” This is a day where you look at all the random odds and ends in your fridge, and find some way to put them together to make a meal. This is an easy way to create a unique soup, salad, sandwich, or stew! This works best if you do it the day before you go grocery shopping so the odds and ends don’t get hidden in your fridge behind new food. We also have a “Leftover Free-for-All” where everyone picks a leftover in the fridge to eat that night for dinner. Anything is game, as long as it’s leftovers.
2. Don’t Buy More Than You Need – It doesn’t do you any good to buy a ton of food on sale, then waste half of it. Instead, focus on only buying as much as you need, regardless of how good the price is. If you have a big freezer, you can buy some extra food as long as there’s space in the freezer for it. And if you have a dehydrator or know how to can, you could also buy some excess to preserve. But in all other cases, stick to only buying what your family can actually consume before the food spoils.
3. Learn Food Preserving Tips – Of course, you don’t have to freeze, dry, or can your food to reduce your family’s food waste! Instead, you just need to learn some basic food preservation tips. For example, keep ethylene gas producing fruits and vegetables away from ethylene sensitive ones or the sensitive ones may ripen faster. So don’t keep your bananas and tomatoes next to your carrots and watermelon! And always put a paper towel in the bag/container of any produce that was damp in the store. Wrapping frozen food in heavy duty foil or putting it in a freezer bag helps reduce instances of freezer burn!
4. Make More on Purpose – Are you often throwing out leftover bits of things that you used in your recipes? To prevent that, just use up the whole thing by doubling your recipes! You can freeze the extra food (cooked or uncooked) and have a ready-to-go homemade freezer meal made without any extra effort!
5. Menu Plan – One of the best ways to reduce your family’s food waste is with menu planning! After all, it’s hard to have extra food left over if you’re only buying what you need to make your family’s meals for the week! Menu planning also helps you to make a better shopping list, which focuses your shopping better and helps you save money in the grocery store. So you save money in the store and later at home by not wasting any food! That’s a win-win!
6. Be Ready with a Plan B – While having a menu plan is very helpful, sometimes life gets in the way. If something happens that ruins your original meal plans, be ready to use your ingredients in a different dish so they don’t go to waste! You’d be surprised how many dishes can be made from the exact same ingredients! You may get to try something new that you really like!
What have you done already to reduce your family’s food waste?
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Food waste really bothers me, but I don’t think my wife really cares. She “doesn’t like leftovers” and when she cooks (only a few times a month) she will pick recipies that use like 25 ingredients, and over half of the food sits in the fridge and rots. She has been known to buy tubs of french-onion sour cream dip to eat with chips for her lunch, then brings the 90% full tub home when she gets off work. We accumulated 9 mostly full tubs of this stuff in the refrigerator before the oldest ones began to expire. I suggested she pack a small lunch-box sized cooler and keep the dip in there, or use her work refrigerator to store it. The response I got “I’m not doing that!”. Jesus Christ, it feels like I married a spoiled 14-year old teenager somedays. We’re doomed to basically throw away $80 a month forever. Sigh.