Category Archives: Food Waste

How to prevent food waste at home

Posted on by

Last week, food waste was in the news. For Canada, where I live, the average amount of wasted food by household was estimated at 79 kg per person per year. In my household, even in a bad year, it is less than ½ lb, about 99.5% less. So what do I do to get such a much lower amount?

Well first, as I indicated in an earlier article, food wasted is money wasted, and I hate wasting money. That is my motivation. Another important motivation for me is the way I have been raised and my family’s memories of food shortages during WWII. I have been taught to appreciate the value of food, regardless of its nature. Wasting food is bad, purely and simply! Anyone who saw me discovering the slightest amount of spoiled food will tell you that my facial expression is a good incentive to take one step back.

So, how to avoid food waste?

First of all it is important to have a clear idea of what you want to have for your meals during the coming week or so, depending a bit on how often you shop. Plan ahead and limit improvisation, although there is nothing wrong once in a while to change plans to treat oneself with a special request.

From the menu planning, just buy what you need. Do not buy what you do not need! That way, the food you buy will be used on a rather short notice and will have fewer chances to go bad. Buy with reason. It is indeed very tempting, and that is the purpose, to get lured by store flyers with attractive prices. Some people have a hard time resisting advertising and buy things that they forget about later, and those rot. Some others decide to freeze the food and they forget about it, and the food gets freezer-burned and ends in the garbage. There are a couple of things to think about. First, there will be flyers again next week. Do not worry; the same item will be for sale again soon. If you do not buy it right now, it will be back in a couple of weeks. There is no point of hoarding food if you do not have a clear idea of what you are going to make of it and by when.

Managing the fridge and the freezer is also quite important. The more stuff you put in there, the more difficult it is to remember it all, and the easier it is to forget about expiration dates. Make sure you work on a FIFO (first in first out) basis as much as possible. That is much easier if you organize the fridge in a way that helps you see what is in there, in particular the stuff that tends to be pushed to the back. Easy oversight and access is an advantage. There is no point in having a fridge packed full. With frozen stuff, just make sure you put the freezing date on the packaging and organize the appliance so that you can follow the FIFO principle. Also to keep the foods you freeze yourself, vacuum the food before freezing. It makes a huge difference by reducing significantly the risk of freezer burn and thus extends the life of your food for quite much longer.

Another area of waste consists of leftovers. Here there is a simple rule: leftovers are good to eat. If you have an issue with leftovers, perhaps it is time to take a good look at your values. Actually, everything that has been cooked has a much longer life than raw food. On top of that, many dishes taste actually much better the second day than the first day. Personally, I love leftovers and they have another advantage: since I cook more than I need for the first day, I can have food for two or three days without to have to cook on those days. It frees me time! And if you do not want to eat the same things for a few days on a row, most leftovers can be frozen and kept for quite some time in the freezer by following the guidelines I indicated earlier on.

When you buy, check on the best before date (BBD) indicated on the packaging. It gives you an idea of how fast or less fast you must use your food. Not all BBD are equal. For some products, the BBD is really the limit. I see that for fresh milk, for instance. For other products, you can exceed the date without problem, but do not take my word for it. You must also create your own little “database”. For instance, for the brand of yogurt that I buy, I can pass the BBD by 10 days to two weeks without any problem. That is true for that particular brand. It might not be true for all brands. You must discover that by yourself.

Beyond that, there are simple rules that apply to keep food longer. Since spoilage is caused by microorganisms, keeping food in the fridge slows down their activity and makes the life longer than if kept at room temperature. Cooking a food kills most of the microorganisms and, once cooked, the food can be kept longer in the fridge than if it is not cooked. It all depends on your cooking skills and on your creativity to make meals.

Bottom is that preventing food waste is not difficult when you apply simple rules. It is about organization and planning and a bit of understanding about food safety. The reward is that it saves you quite a lot of money.

Copyright 2021 – Christophe Pelletier – The Happy Future Group Consulting Ltd.

Why I can fruit and freeze veggies

Posted on by

The story is a bit similar to the one I wrote about deli. It is partly about quality and partly about money.

20191208_092239It is always great to buy produce at the high of the season. Fruit and veggies are plentiful, so you can get them fresh, ripe and cheap, especially if, like me, you go to the producer directly. Freshness and ripeness are quite important. Only at that stage, produce will contain the highest levels of nutrients. Just like with my story about the deli, it is also important to find a producer that does not pump the veggies with lots of water and fertilizers, because then all you get is a dilution of nutrients and you end up buying more water than you should. Also, the produce tends to spoil faster. Perhaps, the best place I can find the right quality is from my own garden. I water my plants but not with the sole purpose of boosting the growth to get more pounds but to allow the plants to grow harmoniously. I compost all food scraps and that compost goes in my garden. I look for the optimal combination of yield and quality. In my garden, I try to produce more than we can eat in the high season so that I can preserve the surplus, either by freezing, which I do mostly with vegetables, or by canning, which I do mostly with fruit. I suppose that I also could make jams but I do not have much of a sweet tooth. I do make compote of rhubarb, though, which I freeze for later, as my rhubarb produces like crazy in the summer. I hope for you that you have the opportunity to taste produce that you can harvest at the top of ripeness and eat the same day. Nothing beats that. For me the top is with strawberries. The ones from my garden are not particularly big but how fantastic they taste! The stuff I find in stores just does not seem to handle the logistics from producer to store very well and they are loaded with water. I had stopped eating strawberries altogether until I moved here and started my own garden.

I am also lucky to have orchardists as neighbours and I like to buy their fruit especially when they are so ripe that they start to show some little defects that do not sell very well. There is nothing with the taste, on the contrary, but they show some browning and spots, so the orchardist, sells them at a discount. That is when I buy a large quantity of fruit for canning. At first, I thought that canning was complicated but actually it also can be done in the oven, which saves a lot of the problems of dealing with boiling water. I can do 12 cans at a time in my oven, so it goes rather quickly. For all my winter needs, it just takes a couple of days of chaos in the kitchen but it worth the “hassle”. I can enjoy tasty sweet fruit all winter long, until the new season arrives because unfortunately, in the winter, the fruit that I can buy around here is not very tasty. It is expensive and often hardly ripe, or it has ripened artificially, but that does not give the same taste and the same nutrients as naturally ripened fruit. I hardly eat any banana anymore. Yet, I love bananas, but the stuff they sell around here is really sad. The bananas are usually green and they hardly turn yellow as they seem in a hurry to turn all brown and the taste is weird. I remember eating fully ripened bananas in Hawaii and that was something else. Oranges vary a lot in quality and more than half the time, they just taste dull and woolly, so I also gave up on them, except for one brand of heirloom oranges from California. I was a bit suspicious that the heirloom concept might be a bit of a marketing scam but it is not. Those oranges are really great but they are available only for a short period. Grapefruit are usually more constant in quality and that is almost the only fruit that I buy in stores nowadays. Even apples and pears are a bit sad in the winter time.

Veggies I prefer to freeze than canning. I find that they keep more of their crispiness that way but that is my personal preference. From my garden, I freeze green beans, peas, zucchini, parsley and basil mostly. I also freeze the juice of one of the varieties of grapes that I have in my vineyard, as those are just as good as tale grapes. For the rest I make wines, which is also a delicious way of preserving grapes. Those are a treat for the winter time, because just like for fruit, the vegetables that are off season come from further away and have lost some of their freshness. As for my potatoes, onions, shallots and garlic, they do fine in my basement and I can enjoy them all through the winter.

It takes some time, but as I have mentioned earlier, once you have learned how to do it, it does not take all that much time and it is really worth it. It is worth it in terms of quality and taste, but it is also worth it in terms of money because, everything that I preserve for the winter is really cheap when I buy it in the high season, and of course even cheaper when it comes from my garden.

And once again, preserving produce is a great combination of a healthy and nutritious diet; it saves money and reduces the amount of food that is wasted. The triple bottom line wins again!

© 2019 – Christophe Pelletier – The Happy Future Group Consulting Ltd.

Why I make my own deli

Posted on by

There are several reasons and they all fit in the theme of this website. The main reason, though, has to do with quality. I got tired of buying deli at the supermarket and just after a couple of days, the product would become slimy and sticky, not the good kind of sticky if there is any such thing. Next to being sticky, the deli would also have an unpleasant sour smell. I am sure you know what I mean. Since I do not like to waste any food, I would eat it but there would not be much pleasure. Not everyone has the same sense of self sacrifice, as I have been told in a number of occasions. Who knows how much deli ends up in the landfill for quality reasons? The problem is the way deli is made in an industrial process. The meat is soaked in brine and it contains way too much water, salt and other stuff that have nothing to do in meat, such as nitrite for instance. It is not because pigs are more or less pink that pink should be the natural color of pork deli. The natural color is a dull grey-brown, which is probably not as appealing as pink to ignorant consumers, so they get sold things they should not buy.

The second reason is that such poor quality deli meat is rather expensive. That means the added water, salt, sugar and cheap fat are very well sold. I can make similar deli for at least half the price. It contains nothing weird, but the nicest thing is that it has a much longer life. Even after a week my deli is still dry and it does not smell bad. That what’s great about not adding water: bacteria do not multiply as quickly. So, as you can see, making my own deli save me money, is healthier and eliminates the risk of me throwing away something that I am not sure if it still is safe after a couple of days.

In the meantime, I also have found a pap-and-mom store that makes artisanal deli the old-fashioned way and that has the same qualities of having the natural color, having a long life and that does not taste salty, sugary or watery. That way, I can buy deli types that I do not know how to make, and the other great thing is that their prices are very similar to the industrial deli that supermarkets sell. Their value is way better.

Just anything else cooking, making deli is rather easy and rather quick to make. Of course, like for everything else, there is a learning curve, but it is not rocket science. It is a much better use of anyone’s time than checking every 20 seconds in vain if someone sent you an email or a text message. And nothing beats the taste of home-made hams, patés, rillettes and sausages from pork, chicken, duck or fish!

Pâté Rillettes

Rillettes on the left, Pork pâté with hazelnuts, prunes and Armagnac on the right, served with homemade bread

© 2019 – Christophe Pelletier – The Happy Future Group Consulting Ltd.

Food wasted is money wasted

Posted on by

Since it has been making headlines in the mainstream media for some time, you must have heard about it. It is estimated that about a third of all food produced in the world is not eaten and wasted. Recently, I was reading that Canadian households throw about half the food they buy in the garbage. This is bad economics. Here are simple figures to make my point.

You might remember the campaign a few years ago about the challenge of making $5 meals. Those were the days of the Great Recession of 2008 when some people discovered that economy is not always up and economic hardship made them realign their priorities. But time goes by and with economic recovery, being money-savvy has become boring again and who does still care about the $5 meal challenge today? You can see in the text of my Gallery page that all the great dishes I photographed cost even (much) less than $5, so not much of a challenge if you actually can cook and have a good sense of money. So, I will take $5 for a meal per person and with two meals a day that will be $10 per day per person.

Over a year that is $10 x 365 days = $3,650 dollar in food per person

Let’s take the world average of a third of food wasted: $3,650/3 = 1,217 dollars thrown away in the garbage per person per year.

If you take a household of two persons, that is $2,434 wasted per year. For a household of four, that is $4,868 per year. In the shameful case of the Canadian average of 50% (apparently, American and Australian households do not do much differently than the Canadians), these numbers become respectively $3,650 and $7,300 per household per year.

Another way of looking at the impact on household budget is to take the share of the food budget in the entire household budget. In Western countries, food represents roughly 10% of the household budget. Then, it is easy to see that 50% food waste represents 5% of the household income, and a third would represent 3.3% of the income.

Just as in my previous article about cooking in which I presented a calculation of how much money cooking can save you, you can see how much money you can save by not wasting food. That is free money that you can use to pay your mortgage or anything else useful to make your life better now or for the future.

These two examples, cooking at home and not wasting food, save literally thousands and thousands of dollars per year to your household, and the amazing thing is that this is YOUR money. You can make it work for you or join the legions of people struggling financially because of poor sense of home economics. This is easy money to keep on your bank account. All it takes to save this money is just some sense of organization in the kitchen and a bit of discipline.

After reading the article about the poor Canadian performance (I live in Canada), I did my own estimate of how much food I throw away, and I got to a figure less than 1%! Next to that, I compost all food scraps and I use the compost in my garden where I grow my own produce, which also saves me money and it is all produce free from any chemical whatsoever!

And when it comes to food waste, there is of course the issue of waste at the level of restaurants and retailers. Don’t hold your breath too much. I have heard about this problem for about 50 years and it clearly has not improved all that much despite the active communication campaigns when the issue makes the media headlines. I recently read that the US retailers Kroger and Walmart were re-evaluating their “ugly produce” concepts as they notice that consumers prefer to pick the pretty ones, which sounds like they might give it up. So much for social and environmental responsibility that we always hear so much about. When it comes to the $$$, then it is a different tune. There is a reason why there are different quality grades and why people make the choices they make. It is called market and price. It is also about knowledge and perception. it is also about store ownership. I can tell you this: when I was a kid, I used to go with my father on the market. We made sure that we would never throw anything away and that all our products would be sold by the end of the day. It required sensible planning and also the proper commercial thinking, which sometimes included to adjust the pricing on slow days. Money always talks to customers. it also talks to business owners. Trust me when it is your money that is in the business, you look at it quite differently than when it is someone else’s.

Copyright 2019 – Christophe Pelletier – The Happy Future Group Consulting Ltd.