With the holidays fast approaching, I wanted to pass on a few quick tips to help you minimize holiday food waste:
1. Don’t cook too much food. Thanksgiving celebrates abundance. As far as I know, none of the winter holidays do. Get a good guest count and try not to go overboard. After all, we can only eat so much goose.
2. Don’t serve too much. Let family and friends serve themselves so they can take as much or as little as they want. Beware the “good provider syndrome,”
3. Be proactive with leftovers. Share the love and leftovers–redistribute them to other guests. And then repurpose what you have leftover. It helps to have an idea of other dishes you can create with leftovers (i.e. roast chicken to chicken soup).
Bonus: Eat some fruitcake–nobody else is going to!
4 Comments
Another one to add would be to turn down food that you aren’t going to eat. No need for it to take up space on a plate just to be dumped.
Oooh–good one, Mike!
Great ideas Jonathon. The over cooking thing is so common but the over buying of food is also huge! May we all this smaller portions this year! Happy holidays.
Jonathan, thank you so much for your recent article about food waste on MSN Money. I love and agree with your ideas! And because of the article, I bought your book. And then in the book, I found your blog!
I find that cutting down on food waste fits in perfectly with my Minimalism tendencies.
Thanks so much! And keep writing!