Prevent Wasted Food

Smart shopping and $aving — not just for the holidays!

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Happy Holiday Greetings, Conscientious Food Consumers!

As we head into the final stretch of this unprecedented year, we hope you are discovering some new and creative ways to experience holiday cheer this season. Not to mention good bargains (no matter which holiday you shop for)!

Those holiday sales at the grocery store can sure make it difficult to stick to a shopping list — especially with lures like “Buy one/Get one!” (BOGO) and “Rewards”! But we all know from experience what happens when we don’t… and then the bank card statements arrive. It also tends to result in wasted food and wasted money.

Shopping lists are certainly a lot more high-tech now than in the bygone era pictured above, but I still prefer an old-fashioned paper list (soon to become an antique as well?). There’s endless apps for your smart phone, or you can download and print out our “Smart Shopping with Meals in Mind” form.

Over $7 billion spent in 2020 online grocery shopping

Shopping sure looks different now than it did at the beginning of the year, doesn’t it? We’ve de-coupled socializing and shopping, and learned to keep our distance in the store aisles. We stand on colored circles on the floor as we wait for our turn at the checkout. Online grocery sales in the U.S. grew from $1.2 billion in August 2019 to an over $7 billion industry as of June 2020.

On the plus side of online grocery shopping —  we’re pretty much forced to use lists! Whether you’re ordering through a local supermarket chain, an independent market (like NFLB and Sustainability Coalition partner First Alternative Co-op), or a non-local supplier, you have to get organized and be very specific (quantity, brand and other attributes). With service fees and tips on top of that grocery bill, we are likely to be more careful with our ordering.

Another plus — when someone else is fulfilling your order, it’s easier to resist impulse buying and off-list purchases!

On the down side — the carbon footprint associated with online order fulfillment and delivery, including all that packaging! And don’t forget your vehicle emissions from picking up your own order. For more information on the environmental impacts of food packaging, check out NFLB’s links to Oregon DEQ’s Food Fact sheets.

One of Karen’s recent shopping lists

KAREN CONFESSES: There are definitely times when I don’t use a shopping list… and I always end up having to go back for the things I forgot or really needed!

Sometimes I find myself “pigging out” on spending for extra treats or costly specialty items. While I enjoy being spontaneous in the store on occasion, those indulgences certainly add up.

Stick To The List so you don’t “pig out” with your shopping cart!

At this stage of the 2020 holiday season, Conscientious Food Consumers and Shoppers, we realize you may have already completed the bulk of your holiday shopping. So consider how the following tips can facilitate your “Smart Shopping and $avings” heading into the New Year:

  1. Shop your fridge/freezer and pantry first! Be sure to make notes as appropriate on your Freezer Inventory.
  2. In the spirit of eating locally, keeping our shopping dollars in the community (at least some of them) — and potentially reducing the carbon footprint of your purchases — consciously decide which items you can Buy Local First, either in person or online.
  3. Skip those BOGO deals, “family sized” meals or quantity packages unless… you can realistically manage that influx of food products. Assess your household’s eating habits and the state of your pantry. Are you sure you can properly store, plan and prep it all before it loses its freshness and store appeal?
    — Maybe your two-person household hasn’t eaten its way through the Thanksgiving leftovers in the freezer yet.
    — Do your kids really like that brand of cereal enough to justify buying a big box or two?
    — Does your fridge really have room for most of that five-pound bag of tangerines? (They shouldn’t be kept outside of cold storage for more than a week.)
    Don’t be tempted to “save” a few dollars on food that will eventually go to waste!
  4. Use a shopping list app like Big Oven (if you don’t already have one).
  5. Take a “Shelfie”! If you want to make sure you’ve remembered everything for your list, take a quick picture of your fridge or pantry shelf for reference. Shout out to Love Food/Hate Waste and WRAP in the U.K. for this clever name and idea!
  6. For even more ideas (and your New Year’s resolutions), scan this list of 75 tips for saving $$ on food from TheKitchn. We don’t necessarily endorse all of these, and some are not that original or relevant to our region. But we’re pleased to see No Food Left Behind’s standard recommendations in the top five of the list!

Do you have some Smart Shopping tips you’d like to share? If so, please submit them in the comments section below.

Happy Safe Holidays, Conscientious Consumers!!

Adventures in Leftover Land

Greetings Conscientious Food Consumers!

With Thanksgiving not far off, we figured we’d get ahead of the game and talk leftovers in this installment of Kitchen Confessions. The topic’s not as sexy as last week’s carrots, but it’s one of those everyday challenges that we all face.

Those miscellaneous meal remnants, half-full containers, and portions of what-have-you, DO tend to get out of hand, don’t they?

Somehow they migrate to the most inconvenient recesses of your fridge. They get hijacked by microbes or neglected during busy times, like a tough week of homeschooling. They get abandoned in favor of preferred foods or convenience meals. Some might occasionally skip Leftovers Night on their weekly meal plan.

Let’s admit it — leftovers do get left behind sometimes!

Eat First! examples from Karen’s fridge shelf

KAREN CONFESSES right off the bat here: about half of the wasted food in my household once occupied the designated “Eat First” area of my fridge and cupboard. So what’s my issue? Keeping up with leftovers means keeping them accessible and safely stored, as well as keeping track of what’s in there!

It also takes a deliberate and creative effort to transform random food elements into a meal. I’m happy to report that it can be a pretty satisfying process! Maybe even a bit of an adventure…

KAREN ALSO CONFESSES: Two of the seven leftover items in the first photo (apple, sliced overripe pear, half a lime, a third of a packet of precooked rice, half a large roasted chile, a bit less than half a red onion, half-jar curry paste) got spoiled, wasted and composted. Fortunately, the rest found their way into oatmeal, stir fry and a pot of chili!

$$ WASTED: approximately $30 last month

LESSON LEARNED: I’m now a fan of BigOven.com and its inspirational three-ingredient search engine. It’s been both a delight and an Adventure to rummage for what I have on hand, plug it into the recipe search feature and see what comes up!

Big Oven is also available as an app for Android and iPhone/iPad (and is one of our featured downloadable “Apps!“). Big Oven’s massive recipe database contains more than 50,000 entries contributed by its members, including gluten-free, vegan/vegetarian, keto and low-carb dietary options.

In combination with NFLB’s downloadable Meal Planner, I’ve stepped up my diligence and am loving my leftovers more!

NO CORNBREAD LEFT OVERS LEFT BEHIND: These muffins were made from that “expired” cornbread mix featured in our “Check it before you chuck it” Kitchen Confessions a few weeks ago. The adventure began with a couple of chopped poblano chile peppers thrown in to jazz up the batter, which produced a baker’s dozen muffins. Half of them tasted good enough for outright scarfing and sharing with a friend! The “leftover” muffins were crumbled, seasoned and simmered with leeks and garlic for stuffing butternut squash, garnished with leftover feta cheese. No corn bread muffins left behind…

Karen’s everyday vs “company coffee” pots — drip vs perk (lower energy use) and fewer “cuppas” leftover/left behind

LEFTOVER COFFEE BUZZ: Turns out yesterday’s coffee brightens up lots of things besides brain cells — from milkshakes and smoothies to salad dressing, chili, brownies, bacon and BBQ sauce.

Coffee and bacon are staples of the typical American breakfast, but cooking the bacon in coffee is certainly a new idea to me!

NOTE: For my daily cuppa, I try to avoid “over-preparation” and waste of this global commodity by brewing small batches. Many days there’s nothing left in the pot, but it’s great to have ways to put it to good use on the days when there ‘s a half or full cup left over.

I also keep in mind the environmental costs and carbon footprint associated with my coffee enjoyment, as described in this Coffee Fact Sheet from the Oregon Department of Environment Quality.

A few other discoveries from my adventures in “Leftover Land”:

  • “LAST TWO BAGELS” BREAD PUDDING
  • LEFT OVER FETA, OLIVE & KALE FRITTATA (lots of variations on this one!)
  • GREEN SMOOTHIE, featuring RIPE AVOCADO and/or other past-their-prime fruits and veggies
  • SAUTEED WILTED LETTUCE  & GREENS — Great use of those partial-packages of mixed greens that might otherwise get dumped at the first sign of sliminess
  • YOGURT SUNDAE with LEFTOVER JAM and coconut flakes
  • FROZEN BERRY-BANANA “LYCOPENE SMOOTHIE” with — you guessed it — tomatoes left over from the last season. After all, tomato is a fruit!

JEANETTE CONFESSES:

Ugh! I’ve been doing the right things the wrong way. With teenager sleepovers, I never know how much batter we’ll need, and I always figure I’ll use it up in the next day or two. The leftover batters were properly placed onto our “Eat First!” shelf, and I even date-labeled them. A Smart Strategy, right?

However, other still-edible Eat First items ended up in front of them and, well, they aged out. Creatively using up sour milk is one thing, but with raw eggs involved, there’s no way my pancakes or French toast would have been safe to use.

Those wasted beets were a bummer – they also got left behind other leftovers. There were four cooked beets to a package, but I only needed one that night. Subsequently, I forgot the rest of them, despite my date label.

LESSONS LEARNED:

  • Be even more conscious about using up items on my Eat First! shelf.
  • Limit how much we put there so things don’t get buried (kind of the whole point of that area!).
  • Be more mindful about creating leftovers in the first place – make juuusst enough batter so there’s nothing to store.

$$ Wasted: About $2, for two organic eggs and those portions of gluten free pancake mix and almond milk. However, this lesson also presented a disposal issue, because we’re supposed to keep liquids out of the compost. Almost forgot my wasted beets — so ACTUALLY $4 in total.

Learning to waste less food is both a journey and an adventure!

 

 

No more “freeze it and forget it”!

If you were expecting a lurid foodie tale about eager veggies, twisting around each other in the privacy of soil, only to be exposed by a hungry, voyeuristic gardener, that’s an entirely different blog!

If you have forgotten freezer food, you are in the right place!

Many well-meaning freezer users have put good food away for later, but then forgot it there and it froze to death.

This unfortunate habit is just like throwing edible food into the garbage, simply because the outcome is the same… and composting it is only one step better than garbage. 

When you include the cost of running an overfull freezer, plus any gas spent driving it home, the cost of disposal (if you don’t compost it), all the many resources that went into growing it and so on, that forgotten freezer food could become your “kitchen confession”! Wasted food happens to all of us… even our staff!

The easy solution is a Freezer Inventory, one of our many Smart Strategies!  It’s a simple 8.5″ x 11″ form you can download, print out and hang on the front of your fridge or freezer, and change as you go (also en Español). We recommend using a pencil for easier updating.Here’s how to use it!

 

ADDITIONAL TIPS:

  • Another Smart Strategy is our Eat First! signs (also en Español), to use anywhere in your kitchen to help ID which items need to be used up the soonest. Simply print and trim, and apply to any food or shelf containing those items!
  • Overfull freezers function less efficiently! CONFESSION: Recently, my own freezer was too stuffed and the little vent/fan at the back sounded awful! It was working too hard, and frost had built up… if I hadn’t noticed, my whole freezer motor might have failed. Yikes! A lesson to keep it clear and not too full.
  • Items in the freezer door are subject to greater temperature variations, so be more mindful of what gets stored there.
  • Food safety also depends on maintaining consistent fridge and freezer temperatures, so be sure to keep your fridge between 38°F and 42°F and your freezer between 0°F and 5°F to be safe.
  • Remember: most frozen food is safe indefinitely, but be sure to double-wrap food and eat it before it’s freezer burned.

 

I CONFESS: We were still “freezing and forgetting” stuff at home when we started No Food Left Behind – Corvallis. I hadn’t yet implemented this Smart Strategy! Since we did, we’ve had no more freezer-burned food, items are rotated out more often, and everything is getting used. The Freezer Inventory really works and our family is saving money in the process!

Not only that, but our meals have also become more varied as we’ve forced ourselves to get creative with ingredients we might not normally put together. I often consult BigOven.com’s leftovers page, which enables users to type in two or three ingredients and receive existing recipes that use those very items. Just click on “BigOven, what can I make?” – highly recommended! BigOven also offers an app – click here for NFLB’s favorite apps!

Thank you in advance for recommending our Freezer Inventory to any friends with forgotten freezer foods… and if you need one too, that’s okay! This is Kitchen Confessions, and your story is safe with us.  😉  We invite you to share your stories in the comments! Confessions? Or maybe you started using the inventory and want to celebrate? Let us know.

As for those lurid carrots, we’ll have to get to the ROOT of that some other day…