Do you hate wasting food? Here are some tips on keeping food out of the garbage!

A lot of supermarkets make pretty good roasted chickens in their deli sections. They are inexpensive and usually fresh, so they make a convenient dinner after a long day of work. While some supermarkets package theirs in grease-proof bags, it seems like the majority use large plastic boxes that are way too much packaging for the product they contain. This is just one example, of course, but there are many others that illustrate the ways in which supermarket packaging, like that of so many other industries, is wasteful.

Now, some supermarkets are being asked to do something about it - in the UK, at least. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has called for 13 of Britain's biggest retailers, including all their major supermarkets, to cut back. Statistics show that one sixth of household waste "comes directly from supermarket packaging." Fortunately, the markets have already taken some steps to help, investing in recycling centers and reducing the thickness of bags and other packaging materials.

If only the same could be said for those chicken containers at markets in the US...

A few weeks ago, I posted about a restaurant in England that had imposed a fine (donating all profits to charity) on people who took too much food at a buffet because the owners were sick about the amount of wasted. Several commenters thought that this was a great idea or knew of shops that did a similar thing in their neighborhoods. Perhaps more buffets will take similar action now that a Des Moines family was kicked out of an all-you-can-eat restaurant for wasting too much food.

The restaurant staff had been observing the family over the course of several visits to the restaurant. A Dragon House employee said "they just take one bite and throw it away. They take four egg rolls and crab rangoon, take one bite of egg roll and throw the whole plate. That is wasting food." The management reported that the family repeatedly took food, threw it out and then took more of the same food.

Everyone needs to grocery shop at some point, fueling the continuing desire to live, even if you're not a big fan of doing your own cooking. Grocery stores have their own standards for packing bags based upon how to enable your foods to travel well: cold items with cold items, produce in one bag, don't cram too much in. The last rule is the one that gets tricky because sometimes it seems like you end up with 10 bags for 10 items when you're leaving the store. It could be more, if some of the plastic ones are doubled-bagged. Recycling the paper and plastic bags is an excellent idea, but switching to canvas grocery bags is an even better one. They are reusable, so they help cut down on waste, and many stores will even give you a per-bag discount for bringing them in! The bags can be purchased at many supermarkets, as well as being available online, and will pay for themselves in a few uses. They usually cost from $7-12.

Growing up, many children are told to clean their plates during meals. This is partially because parents want their children to finish their vegetables and mostly because no one wants to waste food. The most popular reason to clean your plate? "Because there are children starving in Africa." Whether this sort of statement has an effect on children is difficult to say, but it did have an effect on a restaurant in London.

The Obalende Suya Express, a West-African barbecue restaurant, is enforcing a £2.50 fine for patrons whose eyes are bigger than their stomachs and leave food on their plates. They host an large, popular buffet every Sunday night and the restaurant owners noticed that people were taking food just because it was available, even if they had no intention of eating it. The owners said that they felt guilty dumping out all the wasted food at the end of the night. Now, large red signs warn the customers about the fine. The money collected from the fines goes to Oxfam, a poverty-relief charity.

The only downside? When customers learn to take only what they are willing to eat, the charity won't be getting as many contributions - not from this restaurant anyway. Other restaurants, including chains like TGI Fridays, donate food and goods to charity already, but perhaps this will encourage more business to do so when they can.

A New Zealand company is using some unusual tactics to grab customers' attention. The Brazil cafe commissioned a company to create specialty branded trash cans to promote their coffees. The trash cans are shaped like coffee cups, complete with protective sleeve and stir stick, and shout "Coffee taste like crap?" insinuating that coffee drinkers should ditch their sub-par beverages and head for a Brazil location, to which the cans helpfully point the way. Located in a popular Auckland neighborhood with many independent cafes as well as corporate chains, the cans that were placed outside a Starbucks had their slogans removed by Starbucks employees who were unhappy about them. There is little doubt that the company wasn't a big fan, either.

[Image via Adrant]

 

Over time, some of the dry goods in the pantry will expire, from Bisquick to canned cranberry jelly. Most of these things will still be safe to eat in the weeks immediately following their “best by” date, but it is best to try and use them up before reaching that point. Spring cleaning is a great time to sort through all those cans and mixes and figure out what to do with them. Soups and chili recipes are a good start for most pantry favorites.

Another prevalent pantry item is chocolate chips. The Tollhouse recipe is a classic and one of the best, most reliable recipes there is, so keeping a bag or two of chocolate morsels on hand is common. All of these chips have a “best by” date on them, after which point they will still be usable, but their flavor will begin to decrease. I happen to have a lot of seasonal chips around – red and green white chocolate chips for Christmas and red and pink white chocolate chips for Valentine’s day – in addition to the specialty Milk Chocolate and Caramel Swirl Chips pictured above. Just use them in place of the regular chips in the Tollhouse recipe, or one of the other recipe on the back of the bags. It sounds obvious to say it here, but would we ever have leftover chips if we just disregarded the holiday that they are “supposed” to be for and used them whenever we wanted a batch of cookies?

Perusing the latest issue of Cook's Country, a publication I quite enjoy, I was astounded when I came to the "When Things Go Wrong in the Kitchen" section at the back of the magazine. It is intended to be funny, but what it really shows is that people need to learn when to throw things away. No matter how thrifty you are or how closely you need to watch your wallet, sometimes it is simply best to throw away your mistake and start over from scratch. A good time to consider this action is when food is burnt, bad or if you have been eating leftovers for more than a couple of days.

Witness the following incidents, all harvested from the kitchen disaster stories in Cook's Country:

• A woman wanted to make homemade noodles the way her grandmother did. The recipe looked like it would not make enough, so she added to it until it was several times the original size. She and her husband ate noodles for more than two weeks and it was years before they wanted to eat them again.