By Christi Demitz, Jenna Kaufman-Ross, Michigan State University Extension
In our modern culture of endless choices, food waste has become a hot topic among food policy advocates and environmental officials. According to the Food Waste Alliance, about 80 billion pounds of food are tossed in American landfills each year, which contributes to increased greenhouse gas emissions and billions of dollars wasted. If aggregated into one giant heap, this amount of wasted food would fill the Rose Bowl Stadium, which would make for a pretty pungent football game!
Fortunately, the USDA and EPA have teamed up in an effort to cut U.S. food waste in half by the year 2030. While this goal addresses over half of the food waste in landfills, it fails to address the nearly 50 percent of food waste generated by residential and consumer sectors. Therefore, it is important to recognize the steps we can take to reduce food waste. Below are five easy strategies for repurposing and revitalizing food right in your home kitchen. Such creative, simple solutions can help reduce personal food waste while consequently stretching your food budget!
- Look for inner beauty. When shopping for fruits and veggies, do not judge a book by its cover! Just because produce might look odd or unconventional, it is still as delicious and nutritious as its more traditionally shaped peers. Oftentimes these ugly veggies are deemed inedible by shoppers and left to rot in the store and eventually thrown away. Save the ugly produce! Reserve bizarre fruits for smoothies and jams. Chop up peculiar veggies for soups, stews, sauces and salads. You can oven roast them, or feature them whole in a crudité. More and more companies, such as Imperfect Produce on the West Coast and Hungry Harvest on the East Coast, are hopping on the ugly produce bandwagon. Additionally, super markets such as Walmart have started discounting misshapen produce to lessen their food waste footprint. While such systematic initiatives have not yet sprouted in Michigan, take it upon yourself to be an ugly produce hero and rescue these poor edible outcasts. For more ugly inspiration, follow @UglyFruitandVeg on social media.
- Create a broth bag. This genius idea from The Kitchn.com gives purpose back to all those vegetable “odds and ends” and redirects them into flavor-boosters for soups, stews, stocks and sauces. When cutting up your vegetables, save those nubs, cobs, ends and tops and freeze them in a container or freezer bag for a later use. Otherwise demoted to the garbage heap, these odds and ends are filled with optimal flavor potential. For a decadent, next-level soup, add your leftover hard cheese rinds to the broth bag and freeze.
- Preserve your herbs. Chop your leftover herbs and freeze in ice cube trays topped with a bit of olive oil. Once frozen, pop them out and store in freezer bags for a later use. Drop cubes into sauces, soups, stews or any other time you are in the market for an herb-infused olive oil.
- When in doubt, make pesto. Pesto is traditionally a sauce made with basil, parmesan cheese, olive oil, pine nuts (or walnuts), garlic and lemon. Get creative by using kale, carrot tops or beet greens along with or instead of the basil.
- For all other food scraps, compost. You have heard of composting. You know, that cyclic concept of conserving all of your food scraps, coffee grounds, egg shells, peels and skins and turning them back into fertile soil for future growth. Though it sounds idyllic, it is oftentimes associated with smelly, rotting food, which can be a major barrier for those considering composting. Services such as Organicycle and other similar programs aim to eliminate that barrier and make composting about as hassle and smell-free as it gets with curbside pick-up for a low cost, and for those ambitious gardening folk out there, Michigan State University Extension offers programs and resources to manage your own compost pile!
We can all do our part to reduce food waste. Just employing a few of these tricks can cut back on your residential waste and might even save you a buck or two! For additional resources on food waste reduction, head to MSU Extension.
