In August, I gave a shout out to The Frugal Girl for striving to eliminate her family’s food waste. She’s kept up the good work since then and just recently reached pay dirt.
Last week, for only the second week since she began in March, her family made zero food waste. Nada.
How do I know Frugal Girl is being honest? She’s earned our trust by not being shy about publicizing her squandering.
Anyway, FG provides a great example and some useful tips on avoiding food waste. One idea that I hadn’t really considered was a simple one:
Bake something. Baking(even something very simple, like muffins) is a great way to use up bits of buttermilk(or cream or milk), or fruits that are past their optimum freshness.
She also notes that having others hold you accountable helps. She achieves that via her Web site photos. Now you, too, can have that accountability, by linking a list or photograph of your own waste to her Friday food waste post.
5 Comments
Go Frugal Girl!!
I love to bake bread. The problem that I run into is that as just one person (me) in my household, stuff’ll go bad way before I’m finished with it.
I freeze a lot, and I think I should start taking some things to work, but to be honest, we’re a big bunch of food wasters where I work!
Any ideas?
GLM – I have this problem, too. I have found that just by being honest and open with friends and even acquaintances I’ve been able to find some kindred spirits who GET what I’m talking about when it comes to wanting to reduce my food waste. Now I have some friends who share with me when they have extras and I share with them when I have extras. It works a little better to have some go-to people in mind.
I think part of making progress with the whole food-waste-reduction plan is to adjust the social norms around food. It feels acceptable to throw food away, but it feels a little funny to call a friend and say “I have 1/3 of a 2-day old loaf of bread – do you want it?” But we’ve got to try to adjust those norms!
Another trick is to anticipate the waste – go ahead and take a nice piping hot 1/2 loaf of bread to your neighbor when it’s right out of the oven, rather than wait until it’s less desirable 3 days later.
Anyone else have ideas?
Send it all my way–I’ll finish it.
Just kidding. I like Em’s idea of sharing with others. And freezing is a good option, too.
What about not baking all of the bread at once? I do this with cookies. When we make cookie dough, we’ll store it in the fridge, only baking the number of cookies we want to eat that night. That way you get 3 or 4 nights of piping hot cookies. Of course, that’s only if you can resist gobbling up the raw dough.
Any other ideas?
GLM, back when it was just my husband and myself, I would slice up the loaf of bread and then freeze it. That way, you can easily take out just as many slices as you need without having to thaw an entire loaf.
Do you like croutons? I use dry bread to make garlic croutons(and cinnamon ones too), using Cook’s Illustrated’s recipe(which is on my blog).
Cooking smaller quantities is always a good idea too, if you’re single or live in a small family. That way you don’t have to eat the same leftovers for weeks on end.
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[…] By the way(and I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before), I’ve been featured twice at Jonathan Bloom’s excellent blog, Wasted Food. The most recent post is here, and the first one is here. Jonathan’s blog is allll about food waste, so if you don’t get enough of that around here, I’d recommend hopping on over to check out his blog. […]
[…] Also, in case you missed it, I got another bit of food-waste press in the blogging world. Mr. Jonathan Bloom wrote about me on his Wasted Food blog recently, and also last summer. If you’re interested in the topic of food waste, you might check out his blog. It’s entirely about food waste and goes beyond just residential waste…he writes a lot about larger scale food waste, such as restaurant waste, farm waste, cafeteria waste, and grocery store waste. […]