Did you know that over 30% of all household garbage is food waste; made up of things like peel, plate scraps, rotten food, tea bags, coffee grounds, leftovers etc. Note that this figure does not include food waste from Supermarkets, agriculture and the food industry in general. It blows my mind.
When placed in landfill, these organic scraps become buried under tonnes of other waste and earth in an oxygen deprived environment. As they breakdown they produce methane which is 25 times more potent than CO2 as a Greenhouse Gas. Now that is bad news, on so many levels.
Not to mention that throwing this food away is morally wrong when over a billion people across the world don’t know where their next meal is coming from. It makes me feel sick and very, very sad.
So if this waste issue is so big, what are some of the solutions? Here are a few things that will help you to divert food waste from landfill which are common sense and easy to implement.
The most obvious and easiest method is to reduce food waste at the start of the cycle. By this, I mean when you go grocery shopping. Here are a few tips;
- Take a list. By using a list you will most probably only buy the food items you really need, and in compiling the list you would have checked upon your existing stores at home and just be topping up.
- Don’t shop on an empty stomach. From personal experience, you buy more food when you are hungry, and usually it is food that you just don’t need. It is like impulse buying that kicks in due to hunger pains.
- Grow your own food. Plant a vegetable garden and reap the rewards, financially, physically and mentally. It has been proven that people that grow their own waste very little of their own produce. Maybe it is pride, or the thought of all that effort you took from seed to table.
So by limiting food waste at the beginning of the cycle you can reduce waste even before starting to cook or dig around in the fridge.
During the storage phase, there are other solutions to minimize waste. Here are some that might help
- Menu planning. Planning each meal may sound a bit anal retentive, but it helps you to utilize the food you have at hand. Each item in your fridge (where most food spoils) will be accounted for and will usually be used before turning into some unknown organism that may walk out next time you open the door.
- Use the crisper. Your fridge has different compartment for different types of food. The crisper is the best place for fruit and vegetables and usually last at least two weeks longer than in other parts of the fridge.
- Use stuff on hand. Before you go opening another jar of jam, check to see if you have one already open in the fridge. No use breaking the seal to find that you still have one that is three quarters full.
Finally, what should we do with leftovers? Leftovers are one of my favourite meals.
- It can be put into containers and frozen for lunches during the week.
- It can be used in other meals.
- Cooked too many vegetables? Try making bubble and squeak.
- Too much Christmas Ham? Make a pea and ham soup, or freeze chunks of the ham it for use in a few months time when you crave some hammy goodness.
- Cooked too much soup? Well freeze it so you can enjoy it later.
There are so many things you can do with leftover food.
If worst comes to worst, and eating leftovers makes you squeamish, then at least your pets can enjoy a good feed, or maybe even the chooks can have a nosh up if you keep them.
As for our home, very little goes to waste. If the dogs won’t eat it, the chickens or worms or compost bins will. The only organic things we throw into the landfill bin are small bones, but only after we have used them to make a stock!
In summary, using some of these methods will help you to reduce your organic food waste, and save you quite a bit of money in the process. Waste not, want not!
How do you avoid food waste? Do you have any examples that I may have missed?
Work at Asda now…. it scared me the amounts of produce that gets wasted
I know what you mean. My Son used to work at Woolworths (one of our large supermarkets), and he used to tell me how much fresh produce gets thrown in the dumpster each day. Enough to keep a small village fed for a month!
Gav
We have a chook scrap bucket in the farm stay now – it is a totally new thing to our city visitors not to put food in the garbage bin. I hope the thinking carries on when they go back home.
That is brilliant Kim. Hopefully they will take your lead.
Gav x
You can always have a 14 year old boy around the place…then you never have left overs 🙂
Sorry Andrew, I already have one. And yes, he does eat us out of house and home!
Gav
The menu planning was the most surprising benefit I got from trying to avoid food waste. Any shopping now is totally stress free as I don’t have to wonder what veg. to have with whatever else, I just breeze through everything. For 15 min. planning the entire week is taken care of. Also, I noticed that if I grow food (work it, water it, feed it etc.) I absolutely refuse to waste it.
Great for creativity when you can’t give away that last lot of zucchini or tomatoes. Lee
Kim does our weekly menu a few days in advance before the shop. Firstly we try to incorporate anything that is ready for harvesting, and only then do we write up the shopping list. In this way the garden aways gets first dibs.
Gav
Our house hold is a bit like yours, Gavin: there are many hungry mouths in the form of pigs, chooks, a large dog, to help us take care of any left overs. We also make stock from bones. When the stock pot is strained the bones go in the large, slow compost pile, the one that takes longest to break down and also handles the pig manure for later spreading under fruit trees. Making stock properly results in crumbly bones that are much easier to compost. There really is no excuse for allowing valuable nutrient of any kind to leave the property: if it can decompose, it can be recycled, one way or another!! If you live somewhere to small to make use of compost-able materials in your own garden, maybe a gardening or farming friend would be glad to take care of them :o)
Great tips about the bones Kate. It might work in my Aero Bin, as stuff breaks down in it pretty quick.
Gav x
Bones can be composted although I must admit I’ve not done so. Kate’s comment about a slow compost bin is a great idea though – I shall put that into practice. 🙂
Whatever leftovers we don’t eat the chooks get and LOVE. If something sits a little too long in the fridge and is questionable the choks are still happy totuck in, ducks too. Only anything that has slipped under the radar and gone green (woops) goes in the bin. Ana the goat eats our banana peel and apple cores, everything else is composted and I soon hope to get a worm farm which my gardens need and they will also get their share of veggie waste. I know they love what we feed them as my compost bin is chocka block full of massive fat slimy worms which my brother drools over for fishing bait. 😉
We ran with a menu plan for a month to tremendous success but we had a rough month last month and have fallen off the planning wagon. Time to get back on methinks.
Great post and thanks for the reminder Gav. 🙂
You’re welcome Jess. Chooks certainly are amazing. In lieu of Anna, my worms eat all that stuff. I even ask people at work to drop off their banana skins at my desk each day so I can keep up with the demanding little worms!
Gav x
I was lucky to be raised by a frugal mother, who was the product of a poor and post war rationing family. She taught me to never waste food and we often had “Bally Ann” dinners which is when you use up what is left over in the fridge as a casserole. I’m always saddened by co-workers who waste and refuse to reheat a meal as if it’s inferior in some way. I sometimes think they see not using the stalk of the broccoli only the floret as showing progress in an affluent lifestyle. Carneu.
Yes, Carneu, I feel the same way, which is part of the reason I wrote this post. I see so much waste at work in the bin, it is just criminal.
Gav
I have read this post through a couple of times Gav as the subject is near to my heart and there’s a lot of information in there.
I love growing my own vegetables in my allotment and it gives an insight into the effort that goes into producing our own food. Makes you think twice about wasting any of it.
I use kitchen waste (which isn’t a waste really) in a number of ways. I make stock from bones, simmering for a day or more in the slow cooker, if you add a small amount of vinegar it helps break down the bones. Some kitchen scraps go to the compost at the community farm where I have my allotment (and we share the compost when it matures). I also look after the two worm farms at the community garden. I hold back some tasty kitchen scraps for the worms who particularly favour stuff that’s going soft like pumpkin and melon. I also tear up any paper waste and add it to the compost bin at the community garden as a bit of carbon matter.
I make all my own stock and use that as a base for my “Friday soup” where I check the crisper and anything that needs using up goes into the pot.
Nothing organic goes into the Council refuse bin.
Well done Jean. Your “Friday Soup” sounds delicious.
Gav x
Great article thanks Gavin. I’m new to your blog but am loving what I have read so far 🙂
I have two compost bins (one of them is a rotating type that breaks down material very quickly and the other is a tradiitonal compost bin), a worm farm and a small dog that all manage to consume our kitchen scraps/waste. Like you we only throw away bones but I’ve never made stock – thanks for tip and inspiration I will do that next time!
One tip for composting – shredded paper is magic. A lot of people I talk to give up on composting due to poor results. When I first started I was struggling as well but the problem was too much nitrogenous waste. Now I have a small paper shredder where I shred all our water paper and this makes composting a breeze. In fact we produce so much compost we have for our small garden we have to give it away!
Cheers Claude, thanks for dropping by.
It is a very good tip to get carbon into your compost if you don’t have straw or brown stuff to put into your compost.
Enjoy the blog. Gav