20 Ways to Reduce Food Waste in Your Life

Regularly cleaning and organizing your fridge is one of many ways you can dramatically reduce how much food you waste in 2020.

Looking to reduce food waste? Awesome! We want to help you achieve this impactful goal with the support of the entire Imperfect community. We assembled the top food waste fighting tips that we’ve learned from our customers, our farmers, our podcast guests, and our employees. Here are 20 impactful ways to take action in your life, today!

1. Shop more frequently for smaller quantities of food. While bulk shopping tempts us all with savings and convenience, ask yourself how many times you’ve bought something in bulk only to not end up finishing it before it went bad. Research has found that shopping more frequently is actually cheaper and better for the environment in the long run. Always remember that the most expensive ingredient is the one you throw away!
2. Plan your meals before you shop. Sometimes well-intentioned people waste food because they shop without a clear idea of how and when they’re going to use everything they’re buying. Creating a meal plan before you shop will empower you to only buy things you know you’re going to make time to enjoy. To help you buy the right amount of food when cooking for a crowd, check out the “guestimator!”
3. Plan around the shelf life of your ingredients. Simply put, some ingredients are hearty and some are fragile, and it’s best to plan accordingly. No matter how much you love spinach, you cannot escape the fact that it will not last very long in your fridge. On the flip side, items like lentils, hard squash, and onions are quite forgiving and can be forgotten about for a few weeks and still be good to eat. Shopping smarter means shopping with the shelf life of our ingredients in mind and stocking up on the hearty items while buying the more perishable stuff more cautiously. Following tip #1 on this list makes this practice even easier.
4. Clean your fridge regularly. Thoroughly cleaning out your fridge is a huge step towards a less wasteful life since it makes sure that you can see everything you have in there, preventing leftovers or stranded vegetables from getting pushed to the back and forgotten. It also teaches you a ton about your patterns of shopping, cooking, and wasting and makes cooking easier and more fun, too. Try to do it once a month or every other month, if you can.
5. Organize your kitchen so cooking is easier. Is your kitchen a joy or a pain to cook in? It might sound obvious, but central to wasting less food is creating a space you’ll actually enjoy spending time cooking in. Trust us, taking some time to organize your kitchen and make it a bit more functional for how you cook will make your life much easier and less wasteful in the long run and might just empower you to host that dinner party you’ve been putting off.
6. Plan to have a night where you don’t make dinner from scratch. It sounds counterintuitive, but making room in your schedule for a night when you don’t cook is actually a great way to prevent waste. It will either give you a reason to use up those leftovers you have kicking around instead of making more food, or give you permission to go out to eat. Either way, allowing some flexibility in your meal plans in this way gives you space to adapt to how your week is going, lets you buy slightly less, and will help you avoid committing to overly ambitious meal plans. We’re all human, after all.
7. Be careful of enormous portions. Whether you’re eating at a restaurant or cooking for your family, it can be all too easy (and tempting) to serve people more food than they can realistically finish. At restaurants, try sharing an appetizer or main course if you’re worried it will be too much food, and bring your leftovers home if you end up with more than you can finish. At home, a simple switch to make is to start with a smaller portion and return for seconds if you or others are still hungry.
8. Store your food properly. This is another one of those “small change, big results” tips. Little changes like keeping your cilantro in a jar of water in the fridge, not storing your onions and potatoes together, or keeping your milk and eggs away from the door of your refrigerator will greatly increase how long your perishables last.
9. Practice FIFO in your fridge. “First in, first out” is a restaurant principle that you can apply at home to easily prevent waste. What it means is that you should rotate older purchases to the front of your fridge so you can easily find them and use them up. Taking a little extra time when you put away your groceries to place the new items at the back and the older items at the front makes a huge difference in the long run.
10. Label and date your leftovers. How often have you looked at a container full of leftovers and wondered what exactly it is and if it’s still good? Taking some time to label and date your leftovers (try using some masking tape and a marker) makes it easy to know at a glance what you have on hand and when you should use it by.
11. Learn a few new “catch all” recipes. Sometimes waste happens just because we get bored or overwhelmed by our leftovers. The ability to get creative in the kitchen and give leftovers new life is a huge help in moments like this. Having a few scrappy recipes on hand will help turn your leftovers into the bestovers you’ve been dreaming of!
12. We can pickle that! Portlandia jokes aside, pickling is an easy and versatile way to make your veggies last longer by making them delicious. The next time you’ve got too many onions, chilis, carrots, or radishes, try pickling them!
13. Honor your herbs. Something we hear over and over again from customers and podcast guests alike is that fresh herbs are frustratingly hard to use up before they go bad. Learning more about herbs and how to store and cook with them is a key step in preventing waste and saving money. Keeping basil in water at room temperature or finding a fun recipe for those huge bunches of dill and mint you brought home can be the difference between a sadly wilted green bouquet and a great meal.
14. Start making stock at home. Making homemade stock is a secret weapon for using up meat and vegetable scraps and building a flavorful base for future recipes. Seriously, few things noticeably improve the quality of your food (and the amount of times you get reinvited to potlucks) quite like a batch of this stuff. It makes soup, braises, sauces, beans, and rice taste worlds better. To make stock fit into your routine, try freezing things like celery cores, leek greens, parsley stems, and chicken backs and then making a batch of stock once a month with what you end up with.
15. Fermentation is your friend. If you’re ready to learn a fun new hobby this year, try fermenting vegetables at home! Not only does fermentation preserve your excess vegetables for months, it also produces some of the most delicious flavors around. Once you realize how easy it is to make things like sauerkraut, kimchi, and chili paste, you’ll find yourself fermenting vegetables regularly and loving it.
16. Cook “root-to-leaf.” You’d never buy a pair of socks or earbuds and then throw one of them away, but that’s sadly how we sometimes treat vegetables like leeks, fennel, and beets. Cooking “root-to-leaf” just means finding creative ways to use and enjoy parts of our favorite vegetables that we used to overlook, like leek greens, carrot tops, and broccoli stems. Try it for yourself!
17. Use your freezer. In the words of food waste guru Dana Gunders, the freezer is the magic pause button for preventing food waste. So, next time you have cooked too much beef stew or are unsure what to do with that last bunch of kale before it goes bad, freeze it! Freezing effectively extends the shelf life of many of your favorite ingredients and recipes, stopping waste in its tracks.
18. Use common sense before throwing something away. What’s the difference between a “best by,” “use by,” and “sell by” date? You’re not the only one who is confused by them. Despite the fact that these dates are freshness suggestions from the manufacturer, many people believe they are food safety dates, and this confusion is causing us to needlessly waste hundreds of thousands of pounds of perfectly good food every year. When in doubt, use your eyes, nose, and common sense to decide if something is still good to eat. If it looks good, smells good, and tastes good, eat it!
19. If all else fails, compost! If you simply cannot find another use for food scraps, make sure they end up in a compost bin instead of trash can. When food scraps end up in landfills, they release methane, a greenhouse gas much more potent than C02. It’s in everyone’s best interest that we compost anything that we cannot eat.
20. Cut yourself some slack. Nobody’s perfect, and holding yourself to unrealistically high standards is a recipe for disappointment. Sometimes well-intentioned people waste food and that’s okay. What matters is that we learn and keep working to improve. To quote Zero Waste Chef Anne-Marie Bonneau: “We don’t need a few people doing zero-waste perfectly, we need millions of people doing it imperfectly.

Cheers to less waste and more delicious memories in your kitchen!