waste less food

Do you ever find that your cupboards are full of food, but you can’t find a whole meal to cook.  

Half-finished packets of rice paper, but no noodles or sauce ingredients?  Pre-made sauce packets are out of date by years. Limp pieces of broccoli, radishes and some mouldy peaches in the fridge.

The not-for-profit group DoSomething are running a FoodWise campaign and they claim that Australians throw out 20% of the food that they buy.  That’s one in every five shopping bags thrown straight into the bin. Pretty wasteful for the home budget and also really wasteful for the country.

Time to love food more and live without waste!  Time to get sustainably creative with your food.  Here’s how to do it.

Plan meals and go shopping with a list

Start by planning your meal quantities. Is that one or two heads of broccoli? After you’ve got the hang of it, you’ll find it faster to translate meal plans into an ingredient list.

Eat from the back of the cupboard

Try to use up at least one ingredient from the back of the cupboard each week. Incorporate this into your meal planning and you’ll be surprised at the diversity that this adds to your diet. Target those half-finished rice paper rolls by buying extra to have enough for a full meal.

Use everything in the fridge before going shopping

If you’ve got a regular shopping day, then the day before is time to clean out the fridge.  Perhaps this means a pot luck veggie soup is on the menu the night before, or a pot luck roast vegetable salad.  Excess fruit can be poached and eaten on breakfast or frozen for later. Get ahead of that mushy, slimy back of the fridge thing.

Cherish leftovers like gold

The biggest crime with leftovers is to push them to the back, so that they can’t be seen and used. Extra soup? Frozen for a quick dinner. Left over roast vegetables and meats are chopped and laid out on top of baby spinach as a lunch time salad.