Waste Not, Want Not. 5 things you can do to reduce your household food waste.

As I wrap up my series on food waste, I have finally come to the good stuff: things you can do in your own home to make a difference.  It is estimated that American households throw away 14% of the food they buy, which makes 470 lbs a year or $600 a year.  What!  You just threw $600 in the garbage.

My children are food wasters.  Babies are notorious for throwing food.  Toddlers are notorious for playing with food.  Preschoolers are notorious for not eating the food placed in front of them.  My 8 year old son is now finally a good, tidy eater.  (hooray!)  My daughters are still great food wasters.   Bread crusts, meat, half-eaten apples, corn cobs... in other words, VERY GOOD FOOD.  But, unfortunately, not worthy of re-serving.  (My husband and I do a lot of that kind of left-over eating though... who doesn't love a slice of bread slick with... not butter or honey, anymore...)  

But what to do with this food waste?  Sadly, many people pitch it in the trash.  We used to.  Things have changed now.  We grow a lot of our own food and can't stand the sight of seeing it in the garbage bag.  The thought of this wasted food ending up in a landfill and turning to methane, a nasty greenhouse gas, is also disturbing.  Not to mention the money wasted in growing or buying this food.  There are alternatives, though.   Here are 5 options to help decrease household food waste.  They may not all work for you, but if you practice even a few of them, you will be decreasing your carbon footprint, saving money, and providing other living creatures with food. 

1. Make a grocery list based on meal plans.  This will cut back on unnecessary food purchases that usually end up rotting in your fridge. 
2. Grow your own food.  After labouring for hours in your garden you will find that you waste MUCH LESS of your own food.  "You eat those carrots!  I GREW those!" 
3. Think: What do I have to eat rather than what do I want to eat?  Chances are you won't feel like eating leftovers.  But are we really rich enough to throw out that food and buy more?  There are lots articles dedicated to meal planning with leftovers.  Here's one to get you started: BBC Good Food: Leftovers 
4. Compost your fruit and vegetable waste.  The garbage can is not the place for compostable food items.  These items will make fantastic soil someday if you use a composter or add them to a friend's composter.  An extra step, yes, but worth the effort.   
5. Raise your own chickens or save your food waste for your neighbour's chickens.  The addition of chickens to our yard has singlehandedly cut our food waste down by about 95%.  Our chickens eat almost everything we eat.  Any food scraps we have, even smaller bones, we give to our chickens and they turn them into tasty, healthy, organic free range eggs.  They even eat egg shells which give them calcium lost in the original production of the egg.    Much less food waste heading to the garbage!  They also provide us with a wonderful, rich garden manure.   A good friend of mine, and a co-blogger on this site,  gave me her food scraps for my chickens all last summer.  She stuck them in a fridge until we connected, sometimes up to a week later.   She went out of her way to make a difference, and we valued the extra food for our chickens.  Urban chickens are legal in our city and this is becoming a norm across North America.  If you can't have your own, maybe you know someone who does and can donate food to them. 

For the sake of your children, your health, the environment and your budget, make a change.  This change today will, in a small way, make a change for the next generation.  If enough people make these changes, it may also help stores and producers get a better grasp on how much food is really needed to provide for our country.  And if there is excess food, perhaps our government will find a way to help those in other countries who really and truly do not have enough to eat.  A small step, yes.  A huge difference.

You might also be interested in

Scorned By Big Business, Beloved of Gardeners

Wasted.  A Primer.

Household Food Waste: Why You Should Care.

This post has been linked to The Real Food Forager's Fat Tuesday.