Here’s 3 quick tips to get you started.
You may have found your way to these 3 quick tips from reading my 5 Food Waste Facts article, and you already know that households are the biggest producers of food waste, so let’s get straight into these food waste reduction quick tips.
Getting back to the old ways
Have you ever talked with your grandparents about how they use to do things back in the day. Some of the stories mine have told me seem so hard and time consuming, though others, especially about how they prepared and cooked their food, seem to be making a comeback.
While many chefs promoting these old school methods may first be motivated, to revive the old ways as a new trend, to save on operational costs for their business. The secondary reason that we can all learn and benefit from, is the reduction of food waste going into landfill.
Easy tip 1
The ‘Nose to Tail’ philosophy of using ever part of the animal when you cook. Now of course we’re not all chefs buying whole pigs and cows to cook up for our family, however we can take this idea and use it in our homes.
Here’s an example of what I mean. My husband and I looooove duck and we’re lucky enough to live just down the street from a small family-owned BBQ duck place that sells the perfect Peking Duck.
When we first discovered our new duck place we would buy it, pull the meat, and enjoy one meal, usually a Red Duck Curry with Pineapple or Duck pancakes. But now, since I’ve been looking into reducing the food waste we produce, we buy the duck, pull the meat and enjoy our meal – then we put the full carcass, bones, neck, left over meat, we couldn’t detach, into the slow cooker, add water, herbs and spices and make a delicious broth. We then used again another day as either a soup base or break it up into individual stock cubes that we freeze in ice trays, to enhance the flavour of other dishes.
Bone broth is one of the things our grandparents, well at least mine, did as a normal part of life for a few reasons, to maximise flavour today and tomorrow resulting in cost savings but also for health benefits. According to a BBC good food article there are 5 top health benefits we can get from bone broth such as a way to increase collogen, digestion and gut health, and to support immunity function1.
To close the loop, we put what’s left into a certified compost bag, and because our apartment building doesn’t have FOGO bins, we found one close by to use.
Easy tip 2: Make your own vegetable stock.
What do you do with the ends of your tomatoes and onions, the skin you peal off your potatoes and carrots or even the left-over parts of a pressed garlic clove? You may be lucky enough to live in a council area which provides you with FOGO (food organics and garden organics) bins and they go straight in there to be repurposed.
Even if you do have a FOGO bin, my second tip is to use the same nose to tail concept and collect your veggie off cuts and peels for the week, in a container kept in the fridge to then simmer up in water with herbs and spices to make vegetable stock. Once cooled you can freeze the liquid in ice cube trays to use whenever you need.
Easy tip 3: Start composting.
If you live in an apartment with no backyard and your building doesn’t have FOGO bins like us, don’t worry, you can still start composting your food waste.
As you might have read in my 5 Food Waste Facts article, in Australia there is a fabulous group of people, at the compost revolution2, working with thirty-five councils across the country to provide equipment and education, for households to reduce their food waste. As a bonus, if your council is collaborating with these guys, you’ll get up to an 80% discount on the products you buy2.
Finding this site was how I started reducing the food waste we produced with a worm compost. Before then, I didn’t think I had choices, and I was frustrated and felt powerless to reduce the food waste we produced going into landfill – but I was wrong. And now we not only reduce the food we put in our kitchen bin, by feeding the worms our vegetable scraps, after we’ve made stock. We now have beautiful rich natural fertiliser to put on our pot plants and families garden beds.