How to reduce your amount of food waste with simple everyday gestures
It seems quite impossible to be true, but food waste is one of the biggest (and dumbest) types of waste humans produce. It’s not only a waste of money, but it’s also one of the most unpleasant types of waste we experience: nobody likes throwing away a delicious portion of pasta just because it’s on the edge of expiration date.
YouTube channel Vox in his Climate Lab series has made an interesting report on what scientists and startups have been doing to solve food waste problems:
Koumal Ahmad’s “Copia” project is probably one of the best ways to prevent food waste. Copia is currently working only in California and is slowly expading to the US and, hopefully, in a couple of years all over the world there will be a local Copia delivering service. But until that day (which I hope comes really soon btw), what can we do to start reducing our amount of food waste?
First of all, we need to learn how much food we need in our everyday life. Take me for example: I have no sense of quantities when I’m making pasta and instead of two portions for two people I once ended up making five portions of pasta. That pasta was so much that after a couple of days of storing it in the fridge, my mother was forced to throw it out. Quantities and measures in cooking is something you learn through experience, there isn’t really any other way around. However, we can all start by following recipes online, which usually report a certain amount of ingredients for a certain amount of portions.
Another way to learn how to reduce our waste is to buy only things we know we’ll eat. I live in a household that loves food experiments, which is great, as I grew up trying an enormous variety of foods and by the time I was 12 I was already an Indian, Chinese, Thailandese and Japanese cuisine lover. However, we need to pay attention to what we really need to buy. Here’s another example: once I decided to make my mother a veggie-based dinner with falafel, hummus and a really nice recipe I had found online which required sundried tomatoes. I bought all the ingredients I needed but, as I came home, my mother told me that the tomatoes needed to be rinsed before use and that she didn’t really know how to do it on the moment and, besides, it was almost dinner time. So we decided to store them for another time. Eventually, we discovered the sundried tomatoes package a couple of months later, far over the expiration date, and we were forced to throw them away. Sundried tomatoes are not the most common ingredient in my house, so it was kinda obvious we were going to forget about them unless we had planned a certain recipe ahead (which we hadn’t, because I got the idea the day before and I bought compulsively all that I thought I needed. My bad).
Another problem with food waste is storage. I’m pretty sure all of you readers have a fridge, a freezer and a couple of cupboards were you store your food. I’m also pretty sure that many of you store leftovers. However, there’s this common misconception that if you leave a small quantity of leftovers, then it’s not worth to store, and it gets thrown away in the trash. My suggestion is: if a small quantity of leftovers is left, store it for dinner or eat it on the moment. It takes nothing to wash a dirty container but it takes ages to remove food waste from landfills. Besides, small quantities of leftovers are great appetizers for the next meal you’ll have.
Also, if you have leftovers, I suggest you eat them first rather than cooking something else. Sometimes big dinners’ leftovers are a great meal the day after. If you have a small quantity of leftovers, you can also cook something additionally, but if the leftovers are enough, I suggest you only rely on them.
Last but no least, if you have a big amount of the leftovers you are worried will end up in the bin, gift it to your friends and relatives. Often, when we have a big dinner for a large number of guests, we end up with big quantities of sauce and meat that we can’t possibly eat before they rot. So, instead of throwing them away, keep a part to yourself and gift the other to friends and family. I’m sure they will enjoy some delicious homemade food! Eventually, if you leave neraby shelters, give it to charity or homeless people.
How do you prevent food waste? Are there any tips you’d like to add to the list? Feel free to add on to the list :)