The useful version / keep this one
Seven ways to throw out less food
A third of the world's food gets thrown away. Most of the fix is storage and a list.
The BetterDay KitchenUpdated 2 min read
The short answer
About a third of all food produced for people never gets eaten, roughly 1.3 billion tonnes a year by the Food and Agriculture Organization's count. If food waste were a country it would rank third for greenhouse gas emissions, behind China and the United States. The household share of that is fixable, and most of the fix is unglamorous.
01 / In the kitchen
Plan the week around what is already there
Open the fridge before you write the list, not after. Building two or three meals around what is already in there is the single biggest lever, because the food most likely to be thrown out is food you bought and then forgot you had.
02 / In the kitchen
Write the list and hold to it
A list takes four minutes and stops the impulse buys that rot in the drawer. Keep it on your phone and add to it through the week as things run out, so you are never reconstructing it in the aisle.
03 / In the kitchen
Treat leftovers as an ingredient
Reheating the same plate twice is why leftovers get binned. Change the form instead. Roasted vegetables blend into soup, cooked grains fry into a breakfast bowl, and almost anything savoury goes into a wrap with a sauce.
04 / In the kitchen
Use the freezer properly
Freeze it before it turns, not after you notice it has. Herbs freeze in oil in an ice cube tray, bread freezes sliced, and most cooked food freezes flat in a bag. Label everything with the date, because an unlabelled freezer is just a slower bin.
05 / In the kitchen
Store things where they actually keep
- Keep ethylene producers away from the rest. Apples, bananas, avocados and tomatoes give off a ripening gas that spoils whatever sits next to them.
- Greens keep four or five days longer washed, dried and stored with a dry tea towel in the container to absorb moisture.
- Grains, pasta and flour go in airtight containers, not open bags.
- Leftovers go in airtight containers in the fridge within two hours of cooking.
06 / In the kitchen
Buy the ugly produce
A bent carrot cooks identically to a straight one and usually costs less. Buying it keeps food that was never going to fail a taste test from being rejected on looks alone.
07 / In the kitchen
Donate what you cannot use
Unopened, in-date food you know you will not get to is worth more at a food bank or a community fridge than in your cupboard. Calgary has both, and they will tell you what they can and cannot take.
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