It’s week seven of the Backyard Compost Challenge! Hopefully you all are feeling like compost experts by now. Since we’ve spent quite a while talking about compost, I thought this week we’d talk about some other ways to reduce household food waste. Did you know that nearly 40% of food is wasted in the United States? While much of this waste occurs before the food ever gets to our grocery stores or into our homes, there are many ways to curb food waste in our daily lives. Here are a few:
- Buy ugly stuff! Grocery stores have incredibly strict standards for how the produce they sell must look. This means that lots of perfectly good fruits and vegetables that are a bit too big, small, lumpy, or blemished get thrown away. Luckily there are some food retailers that have realized how big of a food waste issue this is. Misfits Market is a popular online source for ordering imperfect-but-delicious foods that wouldn’t make the cut at a mainstream supermarket. An additional benefit of buying ugly stuff is that it is typically cheaper, too.
- Treat expiration dates more like guidelines. Expiration dates “solely indicate freshness, and are used by manufacturers to convey when the product is at its peak. That means the food does not expire in the sense of becoming inedible” (CNN). Now I’m no medical professional, but I do have a lot of experience eating, and I have found that it’s generally much more accurate to trust the evidence of your senses rather than the dates printed on your food containers. Does it look good? Smell good? If you taste a tiny bit does it taste good? Then it’s still good. Food manufacturers don’t know more about what’s in your kitchen than you do. They don’t know how cold your fridge is or how dark your pantry cabinet is or how humid your summers are or any of the other variables that could slow or hasten the demise of your food. Trust yourself!
- Lastly, if you have some odds and ends whose next stop would be the compost bin, consider using them to make a stock or broth. This could be especially helpful for those scraps that should not go in your backyard composter, like meat and fish bones or cheese rinds. If you have a lonely celery stalk, a carrot gone floppy, and some stumps of onions then you’re well on your way to a broth. If you’ve got some meaty chicken or beef bones and/or maybe some parmesan rinds to add to the mix then you’ve got yourself a ticket to flavor town. A homemade broth or stock is a great way to get more use out of food scraps, they are a million times more delicious than store bought versions, and they can last months in the freezer.
Thanks for tuning in, scientists. Talk to you next week, but until then, happy composting!
