April 10, 2009

I can't believe we wasted this

I'm joining a challenge from The Frugal Girl to waste less food by posting a photo each Friday of the food that went bad that week. The bottom of this jar had a tiny spot of mold on it. This has NEVER happened in our 16 years together. Spaghetti and tomato sauce is one of my husband's favorite meals, he sometimes eats it two or three times a week. I think if he were single, he'd eat it five times a week (and pizza the rest of the time).

So this is really surprising. The only thing I can figure out is that he was so focused on the "Eat Me!" section of the refrigerator I've created, that he actually forgot to eat anything else. Because it was our only food waste this week. You can read more about the "Eat Me!" fun and games here.

I guess that's not too bad, but I think I'll continue the practice of having less food in the refrigerator so we won't forget about it. I skipped the weekly shopping this week and bought only milk and bananas and lettuce so I'm hoping we won't have anything to photograph next week.

To find out more about food waste and the impact it has on our environment, visit Wasted Food. It's an added incentive to do what you can, along with the bonus of saving money. Please share your wasted food-related musings in the Comments section.

5 comments:

Meg said...

Don't forget to keep the Clasico jars. They're standard Mason jars! We use them all around the house from everything to storage to spare glasses to making sprouts. Plus our Tribest blender has an adapter that lets us use them instead of the plastic cups that came with the machine. And eventually we may buy some new lids for them and try actually using them for canning.

Anonymous said...

Angela, I thought of you last night. I put the last piece of pizza we had from dinner Thursday and one serving of veal parmarosa on a plate in the frige for boyfriend's early am snack (he's a sound tech). I inverted a glass pie plate on top of the glass plate and thought about making a masking tape sign to attach to the plate that said EAT ME!
I think you should not beat yourself up tooo bad over a bit of tomato sauce. lately, i've been beating myself up over nearly everything so I'm encouraging folks to be gentler to themselves.
I love Meg's idea about the jars!

Angela said...

Meg- Yes, the Classico jars go in the pantry for rice, lentils, beans, nuts, dried apricots, etc.
Canning someday would be nice, but I haven't even gotten to the stage of growing anything yet!

Frugal Musician- I don't think your boyfriend would have needed the sign with that meal- I'm sure he found it without any prompting. You're right about not feeling too bad about the little bit of tomato sauce- I didn't mean to sound like I was beating up on myself, more like amazed at the irony of the fact that it's his favorite food that went bad.

CB said...

I actually find the whole food waste thing pretty suprising. Maybe I should start tracking, but I rarely have anything go bad on me (although I must say, I did have to chuck the end of a jar of pasta sauce this week too).

But maybe that's b/c I'm a single girl who doesn't care for grocery shopping and never has any food in the house...

Angela said...

WilderMiss-
I think the food waste is a function of having a family. We don't even have children, but I do try to keep plenty of food around for my husband and I. We both work and never had such gender-defined roles until we bought a house. Then he was working so hard on construction type jobs, I thought "well, I guess I could at least make him a nice dinner."

When I was single, I don't think anything ever went to waste because I just didn't buy that much at a time. So that was the good side of being single and broke- not wasting food!