How Not to Waste Food

Heyhey guys :D

How are you? Have you had any time to enjoy spring lately? It’s a little depressing that I turned off the heater two weeks ago and started making tea again yesterday when I arrived back in Graz from snowed in Bavaria. Snow! Who’d still want snow now when you could have the most beautiful spring imaginable?! But well…

Stuck in the car for hours yesterday, I came to think of my last blog post again and suddenly found that I was being a little… well, harsh. Not that I think what I wrote about food waste is not true. However, I finished that post with the simple call to stop wasting food – but I didn’t mention how. It’s like telling someone they need to improve their English without telling them what they did wrong; how are they going to know?

So here are some of my favorite tricks to prevent food waste (and I’ve devoted myself to trying each and every one myself before suggesting them to anyone out there, so these tips are actually first-hand ;).

Shopping

It’s very simple but just as effective: Never go grocery shopping when you’re hungry. Studies have shown that an empty stomach makes you buy a lot more food than you intended or needed. That food is very likely to eventually go into your garbage.

Proving this fact was pretty easy – and astonishing! Hungry as a bear roaming the supermarket, I ended up with something close to a year’s supply of olives and super crunchy chocolate cereals. I’ve still got those olives… 

Bananas

Do you like and buy bananas? If so, where do you keep them? In a fruit bowl with other kinds of fruits? The problem about bananas is: they make everything else ripen a lot faster (those little bastards!). Therefore, if you don’t want them to spoil any other fruits, keep them out of their reach. I found out that they best stay fresh in a dark and cool place. (A cupboard does fine.) If you’re a real banana lover, hang them on a hook to prevent them from becoming brown and squishy.

The fridge

Be honest, do you have a system for putting different products into your fridge? (Kind of a weird question, I know.) No? Well, you might change that. A fridge is a lot more complicated than I would have thought before I knew about its various temperature zones:

 

Door: 
The door is the warmest place in a fridge – ideal for eggs, milk and juice.

Upper shelves: 
The temperature is quite constant here, which makes it the right place for dairy products like cheese and containers of leftovers.

Bottom shelves: 
These are the coldest region of the fridge. That’s why meat and fish are best stored here.

Vegetable drawer:  
As the name indicates – surprise, surprise – vegetables best go in here.

What first sounded to me like a science invented by bored housewives actually does help to keep food fresh for a longer period of time than when you just toss everything in at random.

But there are some unexpected exceptions, too (leading to my personal favorite):

Lettuce

While cooling tomatoes and citrus fruits neither makes them better nor worse (so you can put them in the fridge, yes, but there isn’t really a point in doing so), lettuce is my favorite anti-fridge vegetable.

It’s kind of funny that we like to keep tulips in a vase but lettuce in the fridge. After all, they’re both plants and, although cut, working organisms. Why not treat lettuce like flowers? I admit, it’s not the most beautiful plant and I definitely wouldn’t decorate my apartment with it. But since I’ve learned that you can keep it from going annoyingly slack and soggy for several weeks by putting the leaves in a bowl of water rather than in the fridge, my lettuce has always happily lived in the brightest place I can offer, right beneath the window.

(This is also a great peg on which to hang small talk with someone coming over to your apartment for the first time! ;)

I’m aware that this alone won’t save the environment, nor will food waste decrease drastically if we all just keep lettuce watered. But I’m one of those overly optimistic (call it naïve, I don't mind ;) persons who think changing small habits is a first step to changing the whole thing.

Even if you don’t agree, I hope some of this was useful (no more soggy lettuce!).  :D

Stay tuned, bye-bye