Reducing Food Waste

ByVictoria Updated:

I don’t know about your home, but around mine it use to be that I would throw out a lot of perishable food each week.

How One Family Reduced the bulk of their food waste

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I hated it, and I spent a few long runs and short showers trying to think of a solution. After playing around with several ideas, I came across one that works 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time that it fails is when I fail to do it.

I found that the biggest area of our food waste was in our fruits and vegetables and bigger cheese blocks.

These are all snack foods in our house, and if they were not in snack form, no one was taking the time to make them.

But when I took just 10 to 15 minutes immediately after putting the groceries away to cut up these items into snack size amounts, rarely does it go bad.

In fact, most times it gets eaten within a day or two. I store all the cut up fruit and cheese in containers that are see through, so that everyone looking for a snack can easily see whats available in the fridge.

I also do raw veggies that I know the kids like to snack on such as carrots or green peppers.

Since our family has 5 people who all eat like adults now, we were finding that the fridge was simply too full for the first few days after grocery shopping,and often a lot of the snack items would get pushed to the back and forgotten about, even if they were pre-cut.

Then one day, I decided to move our camping fridge out of the basement where we store it and put it to use on the main floor of our home as a snack fridge. It sits in our living room which is not ideal (post update, it now sits at the top of our basement stairs, in a nook just big enough for it and right off the kitchen so it is handy).

What is great about having a snack fridge is that my children no longer look to me to make them a snack, they go to the snack fridge at snack time and have many healthy snack choices at their finger tips.

Another thing is because of its small size the extra fridge doesn’t cost that much in electricity to run while cutting down our food waste caused by a too full fridge.