Taking Control of the Food I Waste
I'm writing this today because three weeks ago I decided, to take action on something that's been bothering me for a while. I've always liked to cook and experiment while cooking. I would see things on a website, or some friends would talk about some great experience at a restaurant, and I would try to figure out how to do it at home with various degrees of success (let's be honest, it mostly was awful).
You could say I'm a "cook" in the French-Canadian parlance. I enjoy cooking a meal, and most of those meals usually turn out OK. I'm not great, but I manage. And I like to experiment a bit which caused me to buy things at the grocery stores that never made it to my plate. Sometimes, I just forgot I had it. I mean, I didn't forget forget. I chose the easy path at the time.
I would open up the fridge and try to figure out what to cook, and I would get overwhelmed by all the options that were in front of me. I would then fall back to the things I cook the most and just go with the flow. I might have everything in the fridge to do something that I always wanted to, but because I couldn't see it, I would defer to one or two ingredients that I have and do a quick run to the grocery store to grab the missing items for. I would then default to the same meal I've done hundreds of times before. This is my version of comfort food.
There's nothing bad with this story. It's happened to me countless times. I'm certain this has happened to others as well, perhaps you?
What's frustrating is that this feedback loop of going for the easy way out means that the things I bought at the time just sit in the fridge, like a ticking expiration bomb.
By the time I muster the courage to cook something special, I take that special ingredient I bought some time ago, and I realize: it's rotten. So I throw it away and move on. Perhaps by going back to the grocery store. I'll probably play it safe and buy only stuff I know I'll cook, until next time. And the circle will start all over.
This story is about me, but I'm certain I'm not the only one going through those steps and throwing money out the window every year. I've heard of many tactics from friends and family, and all of those have had some varying levels of success, but I always end up wasting food. No matter how hard I tried or how simple I kept my grocery shopping list.
My Attempt at Eating Healthy Without Wasting Food
Three weeks ago, my wife and I were watching a webcast from a French-Canadian chef. He was talking about the tricks he uses to be more organized and reduce wastes in his kitchen. Most of the tips and tricks he gave were things that pretty much everyone knows, but there was a way in how he explained them that got me thinking.
My problem was that I would pseudo-forget things in my freezer and my fridge. And most of the things I would forget and end up throwing away were things that I knew beforehand were at risk of spoiling. If only I could keep track of when these things would expire, maybe I would be able to focus on those items first.
So I built an app.
As it stands today, the application is really simple. You create an account, then you name the storage place you have in your home (fridge, freezer, pantry, etc.) and you're good to go.
You can add any food you'd like. Either something you bought at the grocery store, or some leftovers. Whenever you enter something, you need to specify where it is, ie. fridge, and when you expect it to expire. It doesn't have to be rocket science, go with your gut and what you're comfortable with.
At this point, whenever you want to know what to eat, you can go to the app and look at things that are going to expire soon.
If it seems simplistic, that's because it is. I started to work on it three weeks ago and we've been using it for the last two weeks. I added the things that I didn't want to throw away and started from there. I don't want to say our lives have changed, because it's too early to tell. But I can say that we have not thrown away a single thing that we listed on the app since we started two weeks ago.
I'm sure we'll end up throwing some stuff away, but now, it will be a conscious decision. I wouldn't have been able to say that before.
If you're interested in trying it out, you can do it. It's free: