Food Waste Friday

Drumroll, please...

No waste this week! Yay! So you will be spared photos of rotten lettuce, onions, and grapefruit. If you're new to this blog, on Fridays I post a photo of the food that went bad that week. And hopefully there isn't any because I'm trying really hard to use up everything I buy.

I've been working on reducing our food waste for the past couple of months, since I answered The Frugal Girl's waste-no-food challenge. We have very seldom had zero food waste, but we're wasting much less than we used to.

For the benefit of my newer readers, I'm going to tell you a little bit about my journey. Sometime back in February or March, I started reading Jonathan Bloom's blog called Wasted Food. He's writing a book about the food we waste in this country, its effects, and what we can do about it. So I was inspired to start thinking about our own food waste.

My first effort was to label our leftovers so we wouldn't forget about them. That worked brilliantly and you can read that post here. It even turned out to be fun. My next inspiration was to create an "Eat Me" shelf in our fridge and that post was noticed by Jonathan Bloom himself and mentioned on his blog. Thanks to my husband, the "Eat Me" shelf has been a big success and it's the first place he goes whenever he's hungry. He's much better than I am with eating all the food that's about to go rotten.

Since we've been labeling our leftovers and using the "Eat Me" shelf, our waste has dropped dramatically. One other thing I've done is to be very careful about food shopping. I buy less than I used to and we still have plenty of food. I used to buy a lot more produce than we actually needed. I like to think that's because I'm an optimist. But it feels great not to throw so much food away.

If you want to find out more about the devastating impact on the environment of all the food we're wasting, check out Wasted Food. And if you need another incentive, I've cut our grocery budget from $100 a week for 2 people to $80 a week. I'm pretty happy with that, but The Frugal Girl feeds her family of six very well on that amount. Check out her blog if you want to get inspired to spend less on top of reducing your environmental impact.

So how did you do this week? Please leave all your food-related tips, questions, and musings in the Comments section. Next week I promise to bring you my findings about the nutritional value of leftovers. I think I'm avoiding that, because we eat A LOT of leftovers.