Over at Wasted Food yesterday, I read "The Weight of Waste," a post about college students who are calling attention to the enormous amount of food we throw away by displaying cafeteria waste on campus.
The post reminded me of the statistics at StopTheHunger.com. Pay attention to the amount of money spent on food then thrown out in the U.S. households today vs. the amount that would feed the hungry today. (At 10 a.m. EST this morning, we'd thrown out more than $48.5 million worth, while $14.7 million would've fed the hungry. We'd wasted about 55,000 tons of food by 10 EST this morning.)
Let us all be mindful as we appreciate our bounty and prevent waste.
I'm actually really good about saving leftovers and I do a pretty good job of eating them. But sometimes I forget what I have in the fridge. One of my favorite bloggers, Heather @ Simple - Green - Frugal, often focuses on mindfulness in our food choices. I want to carry this over to my food waste. My green resolution is to write down everything I toss when I clean out the fridge this month in order to create an awareness and help me to be more mindful in the future.
Do you have any advice on getting the most out of your leftovers?
Happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy the turkey for days to come!
Followers
Inspiring Blogs
Labels
- 2009 resolutions (4)
- accountability (16)
- APLS (9)
- books (13)
- buying used (4)
- challenges (12)
- charities (2)
- cleaning (4)
- community (7)
- compost (3)
- corporate social responsibility (6)
- CSA (3)
- education (12)
- energy (10)
- failure (1)
- food (17)
- gardening (7)
- global perspective (4)
- global warming (3)
- Going Green Yahoo forum (6)
- green blogs (8)
- grey water (1)
- health (11)
- inspiring others (5)
- kids (13)
- landfills (14)
- LEED (1)
- localvore (3)
- movies/documentaries (2)
- organic (4)
- parents (8)
- personal care products (7)
- pesticides (3)
- plastic (8)
- product reviews (5)
- recycling (14)
- resources (11)
- scientific reports or studies (2)
- shopping (16)
- social responsibility (10)
- unique gifts (3)
- water conservation (5)
- wildlife (2)
3 comments:
Wow! That stop the hunger site really gives 'food for thought'!
Many leftovers can be frozen for another day.
Most of my leftovers though end up in soup. When there seems to be too much for me to eat, I just dump everything in a pot and let it simmer. The soup can then be frozen or canned in a pressure canner.
Depends on your leftovers though. Leftover lasagna would be hard to make soup out of :) but it would freeze well.
We often end up picking up a rotisserie chicken if we're in a rush for dinner. We never seem to eat the chicken after the initial dinner, so we've started freezing the carcass and leftover chicken and using it when we cook chicken stock. It gives an insane amount of heartiness to the stock.
I've made all our stock for about four years now, and have the technique down, but I might have to reduce the cooking time next time I do this. Since I already use a whole chicken when I make stock, adding the carcass gives us a good amount of additional shredded chicken, which we portion into dinner-sized bags and freeze. We also portion the stock out after cooling into muffin pans and lately empty ice cube trays, which is great for adding a little flavor to taco meat, vegetables, etc.
Post a Comment