You’re right, if it’s sold by weight, buy however little or much as you’d like. I do the same with bananas and take it further by buying 3-4 close to ripe and 3-4 greener ones.

They this strategy at the grocery store when you don’t want two POUNDS of grapes or cherries. If the product is being sold by weight, simply separate out the amount you want into a separate bag. This works for cherries, grapes, even broccoli–anything so long as it is being sold by weight and not by the bag or bunch.

I am also in the habit of snapping off 3-4 bananas from a bunch.

You can also insist at the deli counter or fish counter that you really, truly want 3/4 of a pound, and the overage is not OK. Otherwise your 3/4 pound is quickly 1.15.

The three of us never seem to get to all the strawberries in time.

One thing that’s helped is to automatically freeze leftovers, to store leftovers in clear containers so we can see what we have, and to declare one dinner a week “snack fest,” in which we piece together a spread from odds and ends we’d otherwise throw away.

Another way to reduce waste at home is to carefully inventory the veggie drawer before going to the store, and using the tag ends of things in a salad before opening the new bag of greens.

I am always freezing the black bananas for banana bread I never make, and chicken carcasses for the stock I want to make, and we throw them away six months later…

I’ve kept chickens for ten years now and I’ve learned to trust their ability to choose what to eat and what not to eat. They get all of our food gone bad (and since I’m the frugal daughter of a half-Scottish, half-Jewish mom, that’s food gone irretrievably bad!!) and they figure out what is edible. They get everything I scrape from our plates. If the cheese has mold, I cut off the moldy bits and that goes to them as well. Their pen is a sort of giant compost pile, producing some very fine fertilizer for my gardens. We get big black trashbags of culled produce from the Willy Street Co-op (and I’m not above “rescuing” organic red bell peppers that just have a couple of soft spots when I see them in there) and scatter that around in their pen, along with lots of dry bedding, like raked up leaves (I store them in the big black trashbags I got from the store, to keep them dry). As long as you have lots of dry stuff, the pen doesn’t get smelly. Sort of a secret of chicken keeping.

Anyway, chickens are terrific, and anyone with a yard can keep 2 or 3. You don’t need a rooster to get eggs, and these eggs are like nothing you’ve had before, if you grandma didn’t live on a farm.