Food Waste | The Sensible Gourmet

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.

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.

The Sensible Gourmet

Healthy Body and Wallet with Gourmet Food

Tag Archives: Food Waste

How to prevent food waste at home

Food wasted is money wasted