Waste not, want not: Find ways to save in the kitchen
Karen Yates, executive director of the Hosea House in Newport, Ky., runs a soup kitchen and never goes out to eat without wondering what kind of food is back in the kitchen being thrown away.
While eating at a steakhouse, she noticed that the T-bone steaks didn't have a "tail," a small piece of meat that curls around the bottom of the steak. She asked her server to ask the chef where the tail was and found that they were trimmed off in the kitchen.
"I want those tails," she said. ("My kids won't go out to eat with me any more, because I embarrass them," she said.)
Now she gets 40 to 50 pounds of tails from T-bone steaks and other meat trimmings from a local restaurant, freezes them, then uses them to make beef stew or other nutritious dishes for the people served at her meal program. Hosea House is the only soup kitchen in Northern Kentucky to serve a hot meal every night.
Imagine the food thrown away over and over in other restaurants. And not just in restaurants – but in every step of the food chain, from farming to manufacturing to serving and selling, and in the kitchens of consumers.
It's a significant amount of wasted food, and hard to ignore, considering we're a country that still has need for soup kitchens. It's also an environmental problem: In addition to the environmental impacts of farming, food waste in the anaerobic environment of a landfill creates methane, a greenhouse gas.
It's hard to measure exactly how much food gets wasted, and the studies that have been done define it in different ways.
The Natural Resources Defense Council released a study in 2012 that concluded about 40 percent of food produced in the United States doesn't get eaten.
Of all of the labor, the fertilizer, the stress put on land and environment, the animals raised and slaughtered to produce our food, 40 percent is wasted.
The food ends up as the single largest component in municipal landfills. In less-developed parts of the world, food is wasted in agriculture and storage. In the industrialized countries, waste is greater in the retail and consumer end.
American families throw out approximately 25 percent of the food and beverages they buy. The cost estimates for the average family of four (from the defense council study) is $1,365 to $2,275 annually. The largest losses are fresh fruits and vegetables, then dairy, and meat/poultry/fish.
Earth Day is a good time to start improving your own statistics. Here are ideas you can put into place at home to waste less food and save more money.
1. Plan your grocery shopping. But don't over-plan. If you don't go to the store with a list, you're likely to buy all kinds of odd things that don't get used because you don't have a plan for them. But if you plan too much, you may have too much food. Leave room for those nights when you decide to order in a pizza, or for when no one is home together, or when everyone just makes sandwiches. Include a day for leftovers. And watch those large quantity and two-for-one coupon purchases. It doesn't save money if you don't eat it. (These rules do not apply to anyone with a teenage boy at home.)
2. Understand "best by" and "sell by" dates. These are not regulated, (except for "use by" dates on baby formula) and aren't based on food safety considerations; they are mostly for the retailer and based on optimal quality of the food. Don't throw out canned or jarred food just because it's past its "best by" or "sell by" date, and use your own judgment on other items such as eggs and milk.
3. Talk to your parents or grandparents. Tips from someone who lived through the Great Depression or other hard times may open your eyes to how to make do and hang onto every scrap of food.
4. Store food safely. Don't let the food you've spent money on go bad because you haven't taken care of it. Get good, air-tight containers and put leftovers straight into the refrigerator after a meal. Don't ever dip into a container of yogurt or mayonnaise with a spoon that has other food on it: that will contaminate what's left in the container and it will soon have weird orange mold growing on it.
5. Use your freezer. If you have meat that you're not going to get to for a few days, wrap it, label it and freeze it. If there are leftovers, and you know you won't be eating them up in the next few days, freeze them in dinner or lunch-size portions. Don't forget to label. If there's a bit of leftover wine that's started to go sour, freeze it in an ice cube tray and use later in recipes that need a bit of wine. Other liquids work well this way, too: cream, tomato juice, fruit juice, even coffee.
6. Know what to do with scraps of food and leftovers. Think of yourself as a contestant on "Chopped," where you're given four ingredients and have to create a dish with them. Your ingredients may be leftover mashed potatoes, an avocado that will go bad tomorrow if you don't use it, some scraps of various cheeses, and a small piece of steak you brought home from a restaurant. It takes a certain amount of skill and ingenuity; for some people, it's the most satisfying kind of cooking there is; it's practically a hobby.
7. Volunteer with a food pantry. Do not take your unwanted leftovers to a soup kitchen or food bank and expect them to be welcomed. "If you wouldn't eat it, I wouldn't serve it to the children, the seniors, the families I serve," said Yates of Hosea House. But you could volunteer to gather up surplus food from restaurants and cafeterias the food pantry has a relationship with. The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act protects food donors from liability if they donate food in good faith.
8. Compost. For those food scraps that you inevitably can't eat, there's composting. Any kind of plant-based food scraps can go into a backyard compost pile, where they'll decompose into a fertile garden soil amendment.