I Hate to Waste Food

Rummaging through my refrigerator, I came upon a pear. It was a beautiful yellow-green when I stored in the fridge to eat later. Unfortunately, later never came—or rather, when it did, the pear was a mass of brown pulp. Yuck. I hate to waste food.

But there it was, and here was I, doing the 10-Minute Fridge Reality Check as part of a “wasted food challenge” I began around this time last year, in the height of Covid lockdown. I popped the mealy pear onto a kitchen scale, recorded the weight in my food-waste log, noted the reason for chucking it (“didn’t see it in the back of the fridge”), and dumped it into the trash with a wave of guilt. Then I proceeded to take everything out of my refrigerator and toss anything that was spoiled, rotten, or far too old, weighing each discard and noting why it died in my fridge. There was a bit of cranberry-pistachio-fig chutney I canned four years ago, a mushy fennel bulb I had intended to use in a salad, half a bunch of limp Swiss chard, and the last sorry dregs of a mango curry I made from leftover Thanksgiving turkey that I could not make myself eat for the fourth night in a row.

I had read about the Environmental Protection Agency’s Food Too Good to Waste campaign, a step-by-step strategy to help people cut down on the amount of food they bring home from the market but never eat. I was immediately intrigued, especially because the campaign’s primary goal is decreasing greenhouse gasses, particularly the methane released from landfills by discarded food. The EPA’s argument: even small changes in the way we plan, shop, store and prepare food can help us mitigate climate change—as well as stretching our food budget and extending the life of food we do buy.

To me, this sounded like the perfect lockdown project.

In my first week of the challenge I had to toss out 1.75 pounds of food. How did that stack up to the average American? A paltry C-minus at best. A U.S. Department of Agriculture study found that American consumers waste about one pound of food per person per day.

I soldiered on, entering weights and reasons into my food-waste log. Three weeks in, I was beginning to see patterns: I bought too much. I love arugula, but those giant plastic boxes are too much for one person, as are the large cellophane bags of lettuce or spinach. I also made too much. I love to cook, and a lot of my favorite recipes yield 4-6 servings. Scaling them down to two servings can be tricky, and some foods don’t freeze well. Then there was my pear problem: overlooking items that needed to be used soon or not realizing that a carton of yogurt or sour cream was already open. And sometimes I bought foods that duplicated what I already had.

It turns out that these are some of the most common reasons people list when they take the Food Too Good to Waste challenge. Fortunately, the challenge offers strategies households can use—and easily tailor to their own situations—to reduce the amount of food they buy but don’t eat.

For example, here is one strategy: Before you head out to the grocery store, make a shopping list with specific meals in mind. There are even shopping-list templates online with one column for meals and another for ingredients to buy. That’s too much for me. I couldn’t imagine myself planning menus for a whole week, though I usually do make a shopping list of things I need. However, my food-waste log clearly indicated that I need to check my refrigerator and pantry before shopping, and having a specific recipe or two in mind as I draw up my list made sense to me. These two adjustments were easy, and I enjoyed seeing that I often already had several elements of a dish I wanted to make.

Another strategy is to categorize foods in the fridge by putting them in a special section of the refrigerator. There are down-loadable Eat This First signs you can use to label the area. But I like the way my fridge is organized. I had some color-coded stick-on dots, so I stuck a green dot on all the things that needed to be used soonest. Bingo! Every time I opened the fridge, I saw an instant inventory status report.

One of the EPA strategies I found most useful is making better use of my freezer. I already owned a silicone ice cube tray that makes big cubes for cocktails. Each section holds about a half-cup. I began freezing extra ingredients, such as cream left over from making caramel sauce or chicken broth left over from recipes that only needed one cup. When a recipe calls for a half cup of onion, I chop the whole thing and freeze the unused portion for next time. Onion tops, carrot peelings, parsley stems, and celery ends go into a freezer bag until I have enough to make broth.

One thing that surprised me was how often my fridge survey inspired me to make a particular dish, largely based on the current inventory. I also found that leftover ingredients seemed to lead me into another recipe. I used three egg yolks in a Key lime pie; the leftover three egg whites became meringue cookies. I made a little too much rice for a curry dish, popped it into the freezer and made rice pudding with it a few weeks later.

I learned some valuable lessons—both practical and personal—from this experiment: that change takes time, that doing something is better than doing nothing, that there’s no need to be a perfectionist or to feel guilty. I did continue my food-waste “reasons” list for most of the 6-week challenge, but I missed several days and eventually stopped weighing scraps altogether. Still, I have cut down on food waste. Yes, the odd pear might rot on my watch, but I’m trying to make food waste the exception, not the rule. I’m not perfect at it, just better.