Looking to reduce food waste in your home? Let me share with you 12 easy tips to reduce waste.
What’s The Deal With Waste?
Food waste is a huge issue. Food production is one of the biggest contributors to climate change. In fact, about one-third of greenhouse emissions globally come from agriculture.
Despite this, both at the household level and at the manufacturing level, we are very wasteful when it comes to food. 30% of the food we produce is wasted – about 1.8 billion tonnes of it a year. So much so, that it has been estimated that if food waste was a country, it would be the third-highest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China.
10 Easy Tips to Reduce Food Waste
Today I want to show you how to reduce food waste with ten easy tips:
Mushrooms
One of my favourite ways to reduce food waste is to dry mushrooms in the oven. It’s such a great way to preserve any mushrooms you haven’t managed to eat. Drying mushrooms really intensifies their flavour, and dried mushrooms can be kept in a jar for 6 months or more. They are so tasty when added to soups, stews, casseroles, and chilis:
Butternut Squash
Roasting butternut squash seeds, or any other pumpkin/squash seeds, makes a tasty and healthy snack out of something you’d otherwise throw away:
Bananas
Banana Oat Cookies
Banana Oat Cookies are a great way to use up black bananas. They just need three simple ingredients – bananas, oats and peanut butter – but they are so versatile and can be jazzed up with any ingredients you have to hand. I used coconut and chocolate chips as an alternative.
Banana Pancakes
Another great way to use up black bananas is with this healthy pancake recipe that I shared the other day. It’s gluten-free and sugar-free, but lacks nothing in the taste department!
Banana Ice-Cream
This vegan banana ice-cream recipe is yet another great way to use up black bananas and reduce food waste. Simply freeze your bananas when they start to go black in your fruit bowl, then blend them up to make ice-cream. It couldn’t be easier or tastier!
Lemons
This guide to freezing lemons is great for freezing all the parts of the lemon – from the zest to the juice. You can even free slices for your drinks/ I like mine in a gin and tonic, or straight from the freezer in my herbal tea. I’ve had a cold this week so I’ve been placing the frozen lemon slices in my echinacea tea – it’s a tasty addition! It also helps cool the tea down to a nice drinking temperature.
Berries
Here’s a simple tip to make berries last longer in your fridge using one strange ingredient!
Eggs
I never rely on best before dates on eggs, instead, I rely on this simple tip to test egg freshness and reduce food waste. All you need is a glass of water!
Milk
Similarly, here’s how to tell if milk is bad.
Bread
Finally, this guide is for anyone wondering what to do with leftover bread?
Spring Onions
Learn how to store spring onions correctly for maximum freshness and longevity.
Oat Milk
Did you know you can freeze leftover oat milk? Oh yes! Follow my simple tips to get the most out of your oat milk.
Wine
Got leftover wine? I know, it doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does I have some really useful tips on what to do with leftover wine.
I hope you enjoyed these 12 easy suggestions to reduce food waste!
What’s your favourite food waste tip? And do check out my guide to the food waste heroes helping to save the planet. There are some really clever ideas there.
Love how you bought all these ideas together. The one about saving and roasting seeds is fab – because they cost so much to buy and are usually in some kind of non-recyclable packaging. Off to find out how to tell if milk is bad now – I thought you just sniffed it!
Great post, Wendy. I’m going to try the banana oat cookies :)
Great post and loved how you discussed a few ideas like roasting seeds, which generations before us have been doing to preserve the food and now is almost lost practice in regular household. It shows how living sustainable is sometimes reviving old good practices.