If you missed the first part to this series, you might like to take a moment to read Part 1:
Why eating everything on your plate won’t help solve our food wastage problem (or save a starving child in Africa).
Now that you’ve done that, here are some action steps you can take today to end your food wastage dilemmas, save your precious pennies in the meantime, and help create a sustainable way of living for yourself and your family!
1. Serve your own food
At the table, it helps to allow each person to serve their own food. Whilst this may seem somewhat inhospitable, it gives each diner the freedom to determine how much they feel they can eat at that meal. Who’s to say I didn’t just down a steak before I came to your house because I was absolutely ravenous after work and surely enough, not feeling so hungry all of a sudden (bad guest manners, I know, but sometimes a girl’s just gotta eat!). So please don’t serve me up a bowl of pasta that could feed a family of four and expect me to eat it all. Allowing your guests to serve themselves avoids over-eating and wastage, helps the cook to estimate how much to prepare for next time, and leaves clean leftovers that can still be used the next day. After all, I can understand not wanting to eat someone else’s sloppy seconds.
2. You can always go back for seconds
Serve yourself less than what you would eat and only go back for seconds after you have finished your meal. Start to experiment with serving portions to find out what works for you. Until you get to the point where you can trust your body, use your mental recollection to guide your eating choices. Think back to your level of activity that day, what else you’ve eaten and make an informed judgment on how much you think you would need to feel satisfied, not how much you want based on your plate size or some other emotional reasoning but how much you believe your body will need to feel comfortably nourished.
3. Teach your kids to eat intuitively
Feeding kids? Teach them to listen to their body’s hunger cues. Guide them in their eating choices but ultimately, you want them to understand how to listen to their body and not being directed by external forces to eat or emotional cues. Helping them to develop a healthy relationship and teaching them about food wastage is critical for their personal development. Serve them enough to ensure they are being well-fed and nourished, but not so much that it forces them to eat beyond their natural inclination or where there is food wastage.
4. For the love of food, don’t throw out leftovers!
Rather than tossing out your leftovers, pop them into a container and eat them as your lunch the next day or freeze for another night’s dinner. How many times have you thrown out leftovers only to realise that you need to buy lunch the next day when you could have simply eaten those leftovers? An added plus, I find food tastes better the day after anyway! Am I weird admitting to this?
5. Save your fresh produce before it goes off
Fruit and vegetables that may be losing their freshness can simply be cooked up and frozen, preserved or cultured. I know it’s tempting to not pass up on the weekly special or to stock up when produce is in season, cheap and readily available. I’m a self-confessed meat hoarder. Seriously, when they reduce meat because it’s close to it’s use-by date, I just have to buy. Especially if it’s the organic and grass-fed stuff! So go ahead, make use of it, but do so wisely. My own freezer is constantly being cycled through bulk purchases of meat and veggies. Just be sure to make use of them at some point! If you can’t see yourself being able to make use of it all before they spoil, then give it away to a neighbour or do a big cook up and invite some friends over for dinner. Cook a meal to pass onto a sick family member. I can think of numerous times I’ve laid in bed on a Sunday morning feeling sorry for myself wishing someone would come knocking on my door with a big bowl of homemade chicken soup! Think these things through before you resort to the trash can.
6. Make food preparation a priority
We’ve lost touch with traditional methods of food preparation because we’ve lost touch with our priorities in life. Why should an hour of scanning your Facebook news feed, watching Youtube videos and updating your Twitter status take priority over preparing a healthy and well thought out meal? Our health has taken a backseat and I will tout it until the day I die, that sick individuals make up a sick society and a sick food system exacerbates this vicious circle. I enjoy my time in the kitchen partaking in food preparation and cooking. Therefore, I make time for these things in my daily routine. Sure, that may mean less time in front of the TV, but because watching TV isn’t a priority, it just happens that way and I don’t really care about what’s on TV anyway! Not knowing who kissed who on some fantasy show will not bring any more value to my life than having a delicious homemade and nutritious bowl of grass fed beef and vegetable curry. In doing so, I’ve learned to truly appreciate the food I cook and the mere thought of wasting something that I’ve poured my heart and energy into would seem like a crime against mankind!
7. Plan ahead
Planning ahead also helps reduces waste. Depending on how frequently you shop, write a shopping list and have a rough meal plan in order for the days ahead so you can shop accordingly. This will help keep your budget in good shape too.
8. Make use of your foods scraps
Compost your food scraps for garden mulching or toss them to your chickens (or to the dog if it does an equally good job). My brother’s sweet Labrador is a real-life food compactor. He will eat anything. Green waste shouldn’t be banished to landfill.
9. Donate unwanted shelf items to charity
There are often charity bins in shopping centres where you can donate canned and packaged goods. Naturally, it’s best to minimise your consumption of these things from the start but if you have a few extra piling up in the back of your pantry, that’s a great way to do away with them. There are also charitable organisations out there who collect leftover restaurant produce to feed to the homeless and needy. If you are a owner of a food business, please, reconsider if the food you are about to throw out can be salvaged or used for other purposes by other people. Of course, if it’s inedible, rotten or unsafe for human consumption (common sense here people), then you know it’s okay to do away with. The point is, what can we do to avoid those situations?
10. Express gratitude!
Saying a simple blessing or prayer before and after your meal is such a simple and effective way to remind ourselves that we are so very fortunate for the food we have. By living more consciously in the moment, you will be far more aware of things you previously acted on in auto-pilot mode, such as scoffing down food mindlessly and throwing out the rest without a second thought. When you express this gratitude, you help to bring your mind back to the moment so as to avoid reverting to your old ways.
I hope these ideas are able to help you make more conscious efforts in your daily lives to actively reduce your food wastage. I’d love to read your comments and feedback below or to hear if you have other ideas that you employ to reduce food wastage in your household?
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