The road to the trash is paved with good intentions.
This is something I've been thinking about lately, as I soldier on in my battle against food waste. Very often, food waste happens because I've had good intentions to feed my family a bunch of healthful food (particularly produce).
I think this is due to several factors, one being that healthy food is usually more perishable. Lettuce is going to go bad way before potato chips will, bananas will rot while cookies will stay fresh, and milk will go sour while gatorade stays perfectly sweet.
The second factor is that often, healthy food takes more time to prepare than unhealthy food does. So, we go to the grocery store with great intentions, buy up the whole produce section, and then we get home, face real life, and find that we don't have enough time to prepare all the food we bought.
Then too, there is the fact that unhealthy food is often just flat out more tempting to eat than unhealthy food. We have NEVER let cookies go bad in our house, but we've let plenty of cucumbers and broccoli heads rot. 😉
I could probably reduce our food waste to almost nothing by purchasing processed foods, but that wouldn't really mesh with my other goals. Not only do I want to reduce our food waste, I want to reduce the trash we produce, and I want to keep my family healthy. Processed foods would help me with that first goal, but would do almost nothing for the other two.
So, what's a person to do? At the most basic level, we need to buy appropriate amounts of produce and we need to use up what we buy. Here are a few things that help me accomplish just that.
1. I plan my dinner menu in detail, including side dishes along with the main dishes. I used to only write down a main dish plan, which meant that I'd go to the grocery store and haphazardly buy produce. Sometimes I got it right, and I ended up with just enough for that week. More often, though, I bought too much and we didn't end up eating it all.
Now I decide ahead of time how many nights we will have salad, or green beans, or zucchini, and I buy accordingly.
2. I'm realistic about how much produce we will eat. It's lovely to imagine that we will eat salads for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, but that is just not reality. I'd like for us to eat more produce, of course, but simply buying a whole bunch of fruits and vegetables isn't going to get us any closer to accomplishing that goal! So, instead of purchasing produce like there's no tomorrow, I buy amounts I know my family will eat.
3. I try to keep a close eye on our produce throughout the week. This is not something I do perfectly, unfortunately. If you've been reading my Food Waste Friday posts for long, you know that I do lose things in the back of my fridge on a fairly regular basis. But, when I do manage to do a daily scan of my refrigerator to see what needs to be used, I waste much less food.
4. When produce needs to be used up, I give it to my kids when they are hungry between meals. I've written before about how hunger will make pretty much any food more appealing, and I've found this is especially true of fruits and vegetables. When my children complain about being hungry before dinner, I don't want to give them something that will fill them up, so I often give them sliced cucumbers (they like to eat these sprinkled with salt), carrots, grapes, or whatever else needs to be eaten.
5. If the fruits and vegetables can't be sloughed off onto my hungry kids, I try to think of alternative uses. If a sweet potato is going bad, I cook it, mash it, and make sweet potato muffins. If I have extra citrus fruit, we make juice.
6. If #4 and #5 don't work, I sometimes freeze produce. Bananas, pineapple, and many other fruits can be frozen and used in smoothies. Frozen banana slices and frozen grapes are good to eat as a snack, and frozen bananas can be thawed and used in banana bread. And while frozen celery is no longer good for eating raw, it works very well in soups and stuffings. Sweet peppers can also be frozen and used in soups.
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So, that's what works for me. What do you do to avoid wasting your produce?
Well, G and I can easily kill a bushel of apples in a day (I'm only exaggerating slightly!), and this goes for pretty much any fruit (including tomatoes) or veggies like cucumbers. However, on occasion something would get put into a food drawer and forgotten. Now, our refrigerator has clear drawers, so this helps. For things like apples, you can cook them up to eat warm or cold with toast, ice cream or by themselves. Other than that I usually use the freezing method. We bought three 3lb bags of onions at the store (they had them for .99 a bag) and last night I chopped up about 10 onions to put into a quart freezer bag, and those will be used in soups. I'll just have to reach in and pull our how much I need. I used to hate buying celery for dressing, because neither of us really likes it by itself, until I realized you could freeze it for soup. Now the leaves get chopped up, the stalk chopped to pieces and frozen for all the soups I make during this season!
Ahhh, and I forgot to mention that I also like to throw random bits of veggies into one big bag in the freezer (when we have too much and I know we won't use it) and then later use them in soups to enhance the broth/stock.
Love your blog. Just discovered it last week and read it religiously now each morning with my cup of coffee.
My three young daughters have 10 chickens as a result of a homeschooling project. Needless to say, we also have alot of organic produce that goes to waste because of good intentions but having chickens enables us to give our leftovers to them to eat up. Granted I would rather our produce go into our bodies but the chickens produce organic free range eggs for us so I can rationalize that although the chickens are eating it we are still benefiting from it.
Incidentally we have chickens even though we live in a neighborhood setting. As long as you do not get a rooster (crowing), hens are very quiet and give you high quaility eggs. A few years ago if someone would have asked me if I would have chickens I would have laughed and said no way but now that we have taken the plunge I cannot imagine living without them. Something to consider when being healthy and frugal, regardless of where you live
Such good tips...this week I bought just enough produce for our dinner meals and some snacking...if any fruit gets too ripe, it will become a smoothie!
It's the lettuce that always gets me. I like salad, but never manage to eat all the lettuce before it browns. My kids aren't the biggest help either. T
I've found that I throw out a lot less fruit now that I have a designated fruit bowl on the kitchen table. It makes it much easier to know what we have and to throw a piece or two into our lunches for the day. Guess the old "out of sight, out of mind" is true!
I generally try to buy a mix of produce including some that will last longer if I don't get around to eating it right away. I am single and don't cook much during the week, so it's easy to forget the good intentions to eat everything that I bought. So I'll get the produce I have plans for using up right away, and make sure I use the quick-to-perish items, and then some things like cabbage, or squash, etc. that will last.
This might not work for many but if you look at the way most of Europe shops they purchase perishables on a daily basis at the local farmer's market or shop....they have very little refrigerators!
I go to the market every other day and spend only a few minutes and shop or fresh items for 1-2 days only. Works for us as we don't eat frozen or prepared things. Good ingredients, simply prepared is what we like.
I also really want to get some hens as we go through lots of eggs! Maybe this spring....there is nothing cuter than the little chicks' arrival at the local feed store 🙂
Hi Kristen. I really love your blog and have been reading for some time now. I've had the same problem with wasted produce, especially since I've started meal planning and shopping only once a week. The solution for me is similar to Valletta's comment: I just buy a small amount of produce at a time. Since I work five days a week, I'm already out of the house anyway so I just stop at a produce stand located between work and home a couple nights a week. This probably only makes sense for someone who is already out of the house anyway, and has a convenient place to stop. Also, I don't have any kids let alone four, so I'm sure I'll feel differently when I start a family!
I like the photo and the new signature. 🙂
Kristen, this hits home! We've been through the same thing, I've tried the same methods, and now employ many of the same fixes. It was hard for me to admit that we just aren't going to eat as much fresh produce as I would ideally like us to, but we've been much better since I started focusing on the tried-and-true fresh veggies and fruits we DO eat, and supplementing with frozen otherwise - we actually eat more, just not necessarily fresh.
I'm with Erika. If I store my apples and pears in the fridge they will be forgotten! But I buy at least 6 lbs of apples a week, so I put them out in a big fruit bowl in the kitchen and my kids and hubby will grab them for a snack or pack them up for lunch. They disappear by the end of the week.
I like the frozen veggies for soup tip! Thanks Kristen for this post!
I used to have the same problem. I do a lot of stir-fries, pasta with veggies, and soups so we have a natural outlet for all sorts of veg. I have a place where I can store onions, garlic, potatoes, and apples, so those I can buy in larger amounts for the two of us. Otherwise I use home-canned tomatoes a lot, my salted mix veggie stock (leeks, celery, parsley, lemon thyme, oregano all processed together and mixed with some salt and then just packed in jars -- all stuff from garden or the farmers market), and my standard winter veg purchases: 1 lb of carrots, a green pepper, maybe a red pepper, mushrooms and a zucchini. I grow sprouts in the winter for "fresh greens" and they seem to keep better than trucked-in lettuce. I use alfalfa sprouts for salads and sandwiches and mung sprouts for stir-fries. Sometimes we have a rutabaga on hand for a winter stew. We've really reduced our food waste over the past year since I buy for just the next week or two (a bag of mushrooms or pound of carrots lasts us two weeks).
@valletta and LN-Yeah, I would be probably be really depressed if I had to haul all four of my kids to the grocery store every day. It's hard enough to get them all out of the door to go shopping once a week, and once a day would be way more than I could handle!
I can totally see that working for someone who has no kids or whose kids are in school, though.
Bananas can be frozen and used for banana bread. Grapes, if they are on the verge of going bad, pop em in the freezer. OMG, its like they gain sweetness and is an honest to god treat! Soup or casseroles for veggies.
My first two attempts didn't post, I wonder why? (K, did you finally get tired of my long comments? 😉 Just in case, the really short version: I'd rather buy produce, eat most and waste some than buy none, waste none, and eat none. Nevertheless there are weeks that I think the compost pile eats better than I do!
Off topic: today I cured my skim-milk yogurt in 130F water in a cooler. It came out much thicker than letting it sit in a warm oven. Worth the extra effort. Yay - less milk wasted via straining. (But more energy from heating the water, boo.)
William, I don't know why it didn't go through! No comments from you came through for moderation, so don't worry, I'm not censoring you. I love your comments. 🙂
So glad your yogurt came out well. I doubt it takes a ton of energy to heat the water, so I wouldn't stress terribly about that.
Well, I grocery shop once a week, basically what I do is buy a combination a fresh fruit/veggies and frozen ones. Only what is on sale/reduced price for that given week. I have a rule of thumb to use fresh the first 3-4 days. I separate the fresh for those days and the rest gets chopped, bagged and frozen. The other days of the week I will use frozen.
That way if something happens and wasn't able to use the fresh for the first 3-4 days. I still can use them later in the week and not go to waste.
planning the veggie use aswell might be a good idea, so you know, how much to buy. Hope that too much planning will not end up being too constraining and frustrating, though.
you buy grocerys once a week, so what you buy, has to keep for 7 days, right? Some things keep better than others. Carrots, turnips, cabbages will survive a week in a fridge perfectly, green salads would need to be eaten in the first half of the week. Apples and oranges should be fine the whole week, actually cucumbers too, pretty much. Bell peppers 4 to 5 days ( plus, a lot of veggies just gets dryer when it gets a little old, they´re still perfectly ok for soups)
(Oh, have u got a food processor? You could make wonderful salads of raw carrots and turnips and stuff like that, they just need to be cut/chopped quite finely, Plus, atleast in here, these things are cheap. It´s not very possible to hand-grate salads for a family of 5. It would be interesting to know what kind of salads your family eats.)
Produce lasts a LOT longer in the bags specially designed for produce. My romaine lasts 10 days or more, carrots forever, celery for weeks. My first box of 20, washed and reused, lasted over 8 years.