related issues in your home.
- Portion control. No doubt there are particular meals you prepare that seem to generate more waste than others. That’s fine if the leftovers will be eaten the next day, but if not, then you really need to look at portion control by slowly reducing the amount you cook of whatever it is with the help of kitchen scales until you hit a sweet spot where bellies aren’t left grumbling, nor stuffed to capacity.
- Get creative – use the Internet. Not so long ago, we were pretty much confined to the range of cooking experiments we could try by our home cookbook library. The Internet has changed that and whatever it is you have too much of in your cupboards that’s threatening to be tossed out, I’m sure you could find a million recipes for online!
Use by vs. Best before
-“Best before” simply means that – the food (according to the manufacturer) tastes best before that date. You do need to exercise a bit of caution of course – smell, sight, taste;
but eating something that is a few days past its best by date is highly unlikely to kill you if it’s been stored properly. We’ve come to rely on these dates too much and we need to learn how to tell when food has gone bad.
The “use by” date on the other hand is one you should probably observe more closely
What to do with food waste
Even being super-careful, you’ll still have waste and there are always unavoidable wastes such as vegetable peelings. Don’t send these to landfill, compost them or get a worm farm.
Curbside composting is already happening in San Francisco, Seattle and a couple other municipalities. It's simply asking people to take one more step in addition to recycling, to just separate out their food waste. There is a real opportunity for cities and towns to save money. Instead of paying to send it off to a landfill somewhere, you can actually get a reusable product out of it and save money on your parks and rec, having to purchase soil amendment.
If the price of food continues to rise, that will have a real impact on how we approach our food. I think that's one silver lining to the rising cost of food. We might be less wasteful with it. And certainly, as the planet grows, we're going to have to become more efficient with the food we have