Stop food waste – at home

Begin at home

Your fridge, freezer and cupboards at full of money – money you have spent on food. Use what you have , before you buy more. By minimizing you food waste, you save time and money, minimize environmental load and can actively impact your own carbon footprint.

How are these things connected?

Every time you go grocery shopping, most likely you go by bike, car, bus or train. Biking is of course CO₂ neutral, but by using the other ways of transportation you impact the environment. The more you buy, the more food needs to be produced and transported to the supermarket. Production demands fertilizer, water, light and heat in a greenhouse, pesticides, cardboard and plastic wrapping. All this is minimized by buying less and shopping locally produced meat and vegetables.

It easy to implement

• Shop locally – buy locally produced meat and vegetables.
• Save your leftovers and use them. Dedicate a shelf in the fridge for your leftovers or put them in the freezer.
• Use as many leftovers in you daily cooking.
• Cold potatoes can be use used instead of cold cuts er as garnish on bread.
• All leftovers are free food. You save both time and money by shopping less, you save money on your household budget and the environment is spared a lot of transportation from the producer to the supermarket and home to your kitchen.
• Chicken and minced meat can me used with leftover peas and corn in pitas the next day.
• Cream can be frozen and used for soups, sauces and stews.
• Make a pizza with the weeks’s leftovers on friday.
• Once a month – or when you have enough – use what’s in the freezer. Remember to mark each container or bag, so you know what’s inside.
• Christmas and Easter a typical holidays where we make a lot of food, make just enough for how many you are. There’s no need for having “more than enough” for everyone.
• Use your leftovers from Christmas for new exiting dishes, wraps with turkey or duck, or burgers.
• The more delicious the food looks, the more fussy people eat. Arrange the food so it looks inviting.
• Store your food correctly
  • apples ripe other fruits, keep them in a separate fruit bowl. Tomatoes, avocado, bread, potatoes, bananas og citrus fruits like oranges, lemons and grape fruit must be kept at room temperature or a little below – not in the fridge.
  • Broccoli, asparagus, cauli flower, champignons, spring onions, green beans, carrots, whole salads, ginger, cabbage, onions, leek and spinach must be kept in a sealed plastic bag in the fridge.
• Stay on top of Best Before dates
• Use smaller plates and serving dishes. The plate looks fuller and you avoid overeating, or having to throw out good food, because you took more on you plate than you could eat.
• Think quality instead of quantity. A good, (more expensive pasta) fills you up faster and in a better way than a cheap one.
• Food must be  stored in the fridge immediately after finishing your meal.
• Semi-hard cheese should be taken out of the plastic bag and wrapped in food paper before storing in a fresh plastic bag in the fridge. Change the wrapping paper when it begins to feel moist, to avoid mold.
• For pecorino or parmesan cheese, grate what you need, part the cheese into smaller pieces and keep it in the freezer.
• Don’t mix salad with bacon, chicken, shrimps, if you are in doubt that it will all be eaten at once. Serve the salad and meat on different bowls and let each person mix their own salad.

Don’t forget the veggies

• Make broth powder from your letfover veggies.
• Boil both from onion and garlic peels, carrot tops, clean potato peels, celeriac peels, leek tops, tomatoes and cabbage.
• Regrow new veggies from scraps . Plant tops from:
  • celeriac
  • spring onions
  • cabbage
  • fennel
  • coriander
  • carrots
  • leek
• Grow your own herbs, salad onions and garlic – fresh herbs are costly and a lot of garlic is grown in China!

Apps and Web

Apps kan hjælpe dig i hverdagen. Jeg nævner her et par stykker som jeg selv bruger, men der er mange flere og der kommer løbende nye spændende app til.

• Too Good To Go saves food from supermarkets, bakeries and restaurants.
• Forager’s Buddy is a free US application for smartphones, designed to help users mark on the map all remarkable places, where they can find various kinds of wild food resources
• In the US there are several other apps, find them here.
• UK foragers can find more information here.

These are some of the easy things you can do to minimize your food waste at home. I hope you feel inspired to start already today!