Cut food waste

- Wasted food wastes way more than just food. It wastes land, water, fertilizer, and the human labor used to grow it. It wastes the electricity used to process and pack it, the fuel to ship it, and it wastes the money we spend to buy it. That's a lot of waste, but thankfully, with just a few small changes to our individual habits, we can save ourselves a lot of resources and money and reduce the problem of food waste. The easiest first step is to take stock of your food waste. Track the food you're putting into the trash can every day. You'll probably notice some trends and start to identify easy solutions. For example, in my house, I realized that we were aspirational leftover eaters. We would make a bunch of food thinking that we were saving time but we didn't necessarily want to eat that food after the first day. We've since adjusted to make just the right amount of food for meals so that we don't end up throwing away leftovers. Another surefire way to reduce food waste is to plan your weekly meals before you go shopping. By taking a few minutes to plan ahead, you can save money and waste less food, winning all around. If you're looking for some inspiration and tools, there's a meal prep handout in the exercise files of this course. The resources also include an interactive storage guide that shows how to store food, how long it should stay there, and even what to do if it's a little past its prime. You can even ask some digital assistants like Google Home, Amazon Echo, or Siri for help, asking things like, "Hey Alexa, "how do I store half a cucumber?" Now that you have your meal plan, you're ready to shop. The next step in your food waste journey is to consider where to shop. Did you know that grocery stores often have size and shelf-life standards that foods need to meet in order to be sold? Those standards result in lots of edible food skipping the customer and being sent to the landfill without ever having a chance at being eaten. You can help by shopping at your local farmer's market or signing up for a CSA, Community Supported Agriculture share. CSAs are often local cooperatives of farmers, meaning your money stays in the local economy and your produce will be more fresh. Regardless of where you shop, the most important thing to remember is to only buy what you'll use. Bulk buying only saves money if you're sure you'll eat it all. Buying only what you need is even more important when you consider that not all food waste is created equal. When we waste meats and dairy products, we're also wasting all of the food the animals ate during their lifetimes. Knowing this can help you prioritize what gets eaten instead of wasted. If you are looking in your refrigerator and you see meat and salad greens that are both about to go bad and you need to choose one thing to eat, try to prioritize eating or freezing that meat before it and all of the resources that went into making it gets wasted. Even if you take all these actions, you will inevitably have some food waste in your home like carrot tops and onion skins. Instead of throwing these into the garbage, try composting. Getting food out of landfills and into compost that feeds the soil helps reduce methane emissions, a potent heat-trapping gas that contributes to climate change. So if you're up to the challenge, try composting at home. Sign up for a local compost collection or talk to your elected officials to start a community composting program. Working with community leaders to make composting easy and accessible to everyone is an achievable goal that will have an outsized impact.