Stop Wasting Food!

In last week's Wednesday edition of the Wall Street Journal there was a fascinating article about wasting food. They said that the average family throws away more than $1000 a year in wasted food! WHAT?!?!?!?!

And Americans as a whole, we're wasting around 36 million tons of food. Yes I did say millions and tons was not a typo. Do those numbers blow your mind? They make me crazy. There really is nothing I hate more than throwing away food gone bad. It's a complete waste of resources. There was the money to purchase it, the time to store it and then the effort to prepare. It's just ridiculous.

via

So here's my plan for saving food (and money too). I do these things and it helps eliminate most of the science experiments gone bad.

1. make a list- I have a sticky note on the fridge where I keep track of what's been put away. This is really great for Greg because when he's packing his lunch he can see what we have and choose that way. As we eat whatever it is, we just cross it off. Once the sticky note is full I start another one. It's super low tech but it works.
2. be realistic- I would like to be an adventurous chef but the truth is that I'm just not. We have our favorites so I try to stick to those types of food. Occasionally I will branch out and try completely different recipes but it doesn't make sense to purchase all new ingredients for an out of the ordinary dish. Try to buy things that can be used for multiple meals. Once I wanted to try a recipe that called for Old Bay seasoning. It ended up being really gross and now I have a container of Old Bay that I'll never use. It was like 6 bucks too. The moral of the story is don't reinvent the wheel every week. Try a new dish or two occasionally and see if it works for your family. 
3. don't overplan- I don't cook a brand new meal every night, instead I try to incorporate leftovers a few times a week. This helps keep the fridge cleaned out and makes my life easier.
4. do a weekly fridge cleanout- If you're cleaning out your fridge once a week then nothing really has a chance to go bad. That's when you'll find the things that you had forgotten about. I'm not talking about a serious hot water and bleach clean up (although that would be nice, someday...), just go through and pull out all the containers and see what you have. This is where you throw away what's unsafe. 

Those are a few of my thoughts, tell me, how do you keep the fridge from becoming a toxic waste dump and in the process save a little money?

Byron, Ellen. "When Good Fruit Goes Bad." Wall Street Journal 22 April 2015: D1. Print.