If you want to live more sustainably, one of the best things you can do is reduce the amount of food waste you have in your home. The sad fact is that around one-third of all food produced for humans to eat is wasted every year, and this is around 1.3 billion tons of food. If you want to do your bit for the environment, here are some tips to help you reduce food waste at home.
Plan Your Meals
One of the best ways to reduce your food waste is to plan your meals in advance. In this way, you’ll only buy the ingredients you need, and therefore you won’t buy things ‘just in case’. These just-in-case items are, more often than not, thrown out with the trash when you don’t actually use them. By knowing precisely what you’re going to make for each meal, you won’t have any food waste at all, except for the parts of the food you can’t eat, such as skins and peels, for example.
You might have to buy ingredients that come in larger containers than the amount you actually need. If that’s the case, make sure you have good storage containers so you don’t have to throw those ingredients out and can keep them for the future. If you’re a baker and you often use things like Satin Ice royal icing mix, storing it in a proper container will help you save money and reduce food waste at the same time.
Shop Smart
Something else to bear in mind when you’re shopping is that you should shop smart. This means planning out your meals so that you are making meals that use in-season ingredients. These will be easier to find and often cheaper too. Because they are fresh, these ingredients can be found on sale because otherwise they will be wasted.
When you are considering what you are going to eat during the week, do some research about what vegetables are in season. Not only might you discover some new meals you wouldn’t have thought of before, but you’ll be reducing food waste at the same time.
Use Your Freezer
Your freezer can be the ideal way to make your food waste almost nothing. If you have leftover food or ingredients, you can store them in your freezer and use them at any time in the future. If you would have thrown that food in the trash otherwise, this is clearly going to save on food waste. Plus, it will save you money because you’ll already have a lot of ingredients or even full meals ready to defrost, heat up, and eat.
You might even want to try batch cooking. If you have more time at the weekend, for example, you can batch cook food and freeze what you’re not going to eat for a later date. You can then buy ingredients in bulk because you need more of them to batch cook with, and this will often result in discounts.
