How to Reduce Food Waste

Food Waste

What Can be Done?

When I hauled garbage, I would notice a lot of what I had in my trailer was wasted food.  Many of the food came from restaurants since that transfer station dealt with mainly those facilities rather than residential houses.  Why wasn't that food transported to food banks or homeless shelters? 

For starters, many food pantries and homeless shelters accept mainly non-perishable items. That was why I saw perishable food in my trailer rather than packaged foods.  Many food banks and homeless shelters lack the means to keep perishable foods fresh.  So, what can be done?  I am going to ignore companies for now and focus on us.  What can we do?

Composting

This is something we can also do in our homes.  There are many municipal composting sites in many areas.  However, there are downsides to composting such as it can cause allergic reactions and it takes a lot of time to turn food into compost.  This can cause backlogs.  While at large scale is not always feasible, there are other ways of reducing waste.

Buying Food from Services Like Flashfood or Too Good to Go

 

My wife and I use these services a lot and it works!  Basically, these two services work with restaurants and grocery stores and sell items that are about to go bad.  For Flashfood, places like Meijer and Kroger sell anything from boxed food to produce and to meat and cheeses.  You can get a bag of produce for around $5 and its a large bag.  

As for Too Good to Go, they are about the same as Flashfood, but they also work with restaurants and sell any surplus foods.  My wife and I recently used them for some pastries at a local donut shop.  What's even better, both of these services are cheap!

Another service is "Ugly Foods".  I have used them before and you buy discounted foods that were deemed too ugly to buy.  So there are option out there for these types of services and I am sure there are many more than I have already named.

Using Your Food Scraps for Feed

Another creative way of reducing food waste is feeding them to pets.  I have pet rats and feeding them chicken bones, carrot greens, lettuce, and other food scraps are a great way to reduce waste.  Many pets like dogs can eat basically the same things we eat and your furry friend will be forever grateful for food you gave them.