6 Ways You Can Reduce and Prevent Food Waste

Image courtesy of apartmenttherapy.com

It happens to the best of us: you go shopping at the grocery store or farmers market and before you know it, you find a bunch of wonderful items and ingredients you can’t wait to use. Next thing you know, you’ve waited too long and some of those amazing purchases are going bad.

No one likes wasting food. Fortunately, a few tricks and habits can save you food and money! Those tricks, as written by thekitchn.com, are:

1. Make a plan. Set aside a regular time to plan your meals and shopping lists so you buy only what you need. When choosing recipes, look for ways to fully use perishable groceries like bunches of herbs, root vegetables and their tops, and dairy products. If you like the flexibility of seeing what's good at the market, you might create a shopping list with general notes like "2x green vegetables."

2. Wash and prep ingredients. Before stashing away groceries, tackle ingredients that you'll be more likely to eat if you clean and prep them first. For example, wash and dry lettuce for salads, cut carrot sticks for snacks, or roast vegetables to use throughout the week.

3. Organize by freshness. Adopt a "first in first out" system in the refrigerator and pantry. Place older foods in front so you use them more quickly, and store newer, fresher ones in back. Or create an "eat me first" box or basket for quick-to-expire ingredients and foods.

4. Use your freezer. Get in the habit of anticipating when you're likely to have an excess of food, and freeze it before it has a chance to rot or go stale. Good candidates for the freezer include leftovers, big batches of soup and casseroles, bread, fresh herbs, and scraps that can be turned into stock.

5. Pickle it. Prolong the life of vegetables by making easy refrigerator pickles. Though pickling is often associated with windfalls of produce, it can also be done in small batches. Got an extra half a cucumber, a few pieces of cauliflower, or a handful of radishes? Yes, we can pickle that.

6. Label everything. Use big, clear labels to eliminate the problem of mystery leftovers, to add a well-visible expiration date to a carton of milk, to draw attention to items you want family members to eat, to organize entire shelves in the fridge — anything that will remind you to eat the food you have.