Today, April 26th 2023 is Stop Food Waste Day! It’s easy for you to get involved with reducing food waste – not just today – but everyday, using three easy strategies:
Prevent, Inspire and Repurpose:
- Prevent food waste at source by storing food optimally, making use of every edible part of the ingredient and planning meals ahead of time.
- Inspire others to waste less, and repurpose more.
- Repurpose food by redistributing any surplus to your local community, or by giving a second life to ingredients that most commonly go to waste.
Last year the Compass Group and its Stop Food Waste Day partners created an Stop Food Waste Day Digital Cookbook, featuring recipes from over 50 Compass chefs across nearly 40 countries. The cookbook makes it easy to create meals which give a ‘second life’ to ingredients that most commonly go to waste. This year there is a Second Edition of the Stop Food Waste Day Digital Cookbook, which includes new recipes such as “leftover bread casserole from Austria, wonky vegetable enchiladas from Mexico, and stuffed potatoes with vegan Bolognese from Spain.”
You can download the Second Edition Stop Food Waste Day Digital Cookbook here:
Source: http://www.stopfoodwasteday.com
Finally, you can use these 10 quick tips to cut down on your food waste:
- Plan ahead and shop smart
- Use a shopping list or take a photo of what’s in your refrigerator and pantry before going to the supermarket/grocery store or farmers’ market).
- Keep a food waste diary
- See the FAO (2021) publication titled Your Guide to Living Free of Food Waste for more information on how to keep a food waste diary.
- Keep fruits and vegetables fresh longer by not washing them until you are ready to use them.
- “Too much moisture on produce can cause premature decay and send food to the trash. If you get a particularly dirty batch of potatoes or other fruits and veggies, you can still give them a good wash if they’re dried completely before being stored.”
- Cook with leftovers
- Consult the new cookbook by Tamar Adler titled The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z (2023)
In The Everlasting Meal Cookbook, Adler “offers more than 1,500 easy and creative ideas to use up nearly every kind of leftover—and helpfully explains how long each recipe takes. Now you can easily transform a leftover burrito into a lunch of fried rice, or stale breakfast donuts into bread pudding. These inspiring and tasty recipes don’t require any precise measurements, making this cookbook a go-to resource for when your kitchen seems full of meal endings with no clear meal beginnings in sight. Organized alphabetically and filled with foods across the spectrum—from applesauce to truffles and potato chip crumbs to cabbage—this comprehensive guide makes it easy to flip through so you can find a use for all types of unused food.”
- Revive limp kale and other leafy greens
- Grow your own herbs in a kitchen garden
- Freeze leftover herbs
- Use the “first in, first out” (FIFO) principle
- Try pickling vegetables such as cucumbers, onions, cauliflower, beets and even fruits
- Blend up the extras from fruits and vegetables into a nutrient-dense smoothie.
- Try this Beet Greens Smoothie recipe by Kristina Todini, RDN: https://www.forkintheroad.co/beet-greens-smoothie
For more information on these and other food waste reduction tips, see:
12 Creative Ways to Cut Down on Food Waste in Your Kitchen (EcoWatch, 2021) https://www.ecowatch.com/zero-food-waste-tips-2650600167.html
FAO. Your Guide to Living Free of Food Waste. Budapest. FAO, 2021. Available at: https://www.fao.org/3/cb6601en/cb6601en.pdf
Sustainable RDN 