Food Waste Friday

For a while this week I thought I was going to be picture free. Then I started eating a couple of carrot sticks, got distracted, and left one out all night. After that I knew I'd have a picture of a carrot. But wait, there's more! While going through the fridge I found a container. Difficult to identify, but those fuzzy green things are in fact breadsticks. Obviously they've been around long enough that they would have qualified for an earlier Food Waste Friday. :) All in all, I'm not too disappointed, everything went into the compost instead of the garbage, and there wasn't that much even to go into the compost! Being publicly accountable for my waste, along with everyone else participating in Food Waste Friday with The Frugal Girl is really helping me stay conscious of our food, and inspiring me to use it up earlier. You can check out how the other participants did this week off the links at The Frugal Girl.

Food Waste Friday

Though blogging about my food waste is making me more conscious, and making me try to use up food before it goes bad, sometimes that's just not enough.



Here we have a peach. I knew it was going bad, but I just couldn't bring myself to eat it, it wasn't a very flavourful peach. :( Though it's not in the picture, for the last couple of days I've been carting a pear back and forth to work - I just hadn't eaten it with my lunch. Inspired to avoid waste, I took it out for lunch today. Apparently I was too late to avoid waste....if you'd seen it you wouldn't have eaten it either.

On a related note, ever wonder how fruit flies show up as soon as fruit goes bad? I'd guarantee they weren't in the house, but once the peach went, they showed up! From this article I learned you should definitely pitch any fruit that's going, larvae can happen fast! I also learned that those little flies can live on just the fumes of alcohol. I still don't want them in my house, but you have to admit that's a pretty neat trick!

You can check out the other participants in Food Waste Friday over at The Frugal Girl.

Food Waste Friday

Alas, my streak is at an end. I was hoping to have another photo free week for Food Waste Friday, but when I went downstairs to get some onion for a sandwich I found out there was definitely going to be food waste this week.


Here we have most of a bag of onions that have gone soft and mushy. And kind of brown on the inside. I salvaged a couple, but the bag was a goner. I didn't think they were that old, but I made the classic mistake of storing my onions near the potatoes, which may have contributed to the speed of going bad.

I almost had some vegetable to add to the photo today, but a timely post at The Simple Dollar reminded me that I should throw leftover vegetables into a freezer container and just make a soup when it gets full. We'll see how that works out. :) I also managed to use up the last of the mushrooms and green onions today, inspired by the fact that I didn't want to take a picture!

Food Waste Friday

Every Friday I'll be posting a picture of any food that's being thrown out in our house that week. Kristen at The Frugal Girl started Food Waste Friday a while ago. The idea is that by tracking the waste weekly you'll be more aware of the food you have and will hopefully remember to use it before it needs to be thrown out.


This weeks I've got a handful of leeks that I never got around to using and a few strawberries. I'm disappointed in the strawberries...they were from a local farm and I'd bought them for a fruit platter to serve at last Saturday's shower. A few days later, the ones in this container tasted like they'd been fermenting. :( Oddly enough, the other container is fine. The fruit and vegetables all went to the green bin, and the ziploc bag is the only garbage. I know some people wash out their ziploc bags, but it seems like a lot of work to me, and I'm sure you'd never get the smell of leeks out anyways!

This week I also made the Chocolate Peanut Squares from The Frugal Girl, and I guarantee you won't see a photo of them in next week's food waste! They're almost done already. If you like Reese Peanut Butter Cups, I highly recommend you try this recipe out.

Food Waste Friday

Every Friday I'll be posting a picture of any food that's being thrown out in our house that week. Kristen at The Frugal Girl started Food Waste Friday a while ago. The idea is that by tracking the waste weekly you'll be more aware of the food you have and will hopefully remember to use it before it needs to be thrown out.

This week I really thought I'd have my first no waste week ever! Until I went to put sour cream on my perogies. Sour cream isn't supposed to be green. :( I'm hoping for no waste next week....which means I'd better find something to do with the leeks, green onion and homemade breadsticks in the fridge!

Food Waste Friday

Every Friday I'll be posting a picture of any food that's being thrown out in our house that week. Kristen at The Frugal Girl started Food Waste Friday a while ago. The idea is that by tracking the waste weekly you'll be more aware of the food you have and will hopefully remember to use it before it needs to be thrown out.



This week I've got an entire loaf of bread, and the remains of some whipping cream. I'm annoyed by the bread since I picked it up on the reduced rack at the grocery store, but when I opened it at home there were moldy spots on all the pieces. :( I'm getting closer to zero waste...maybe next week!

Food Waste Friday

This Friday's post is a little later than last week because I was called in to supply teach today, with a whole 20 minutes notice to get to a school that's 45 minutes away! Let me tell you...grade 8's at the end of the school year on a Friday go a little crazy.

Every Friday I'll be posting a picture of any food that's being thrown out in our house that week. Kristen at The Frugal Girl started Food Waste Friday a while ago. The idea is that by tracking the waste weekly you'll be more aware of the food you have and will hopefully remember to use it before it needs to be thrown out. I think it's helping - I made heroic efforts to use up the cherries and strawberries mentioned in last week's post before they went bad. :)


This week looks bad, but the trail mix, sunflower seeds, peanuts are all from a long time ago. I found them when I was looking for trail mix for our hike. This stuff was too far gone to use, but I did find some newer trail mix that I now know to use before it gets too old! The bags have a pepper that's growing mold and some wild plants I picked to use for salad and didn't use all of (dandelions, violets and trout lilies). The plastic container is some couscous salad I bought from a local market that looked a lot better than it tasted. Once again, all the food went into the compost, the plastic container was recycled and the bags went into the trash. The bags going into the trash bothers me the most...I'm going to have to find a way to avoid that, and it would happen even if I wasn't wasting the food.

Check out the other Food Waste Friday participants in the side bar of The Frugal Girl. She's having the kind of food waste week I aspire hope to reach!

Food Waste Friday

I've been following a blog called The Frugal Girl for quite a while now. Every Friday Kristen (the frugal girl) posts a picture of any food she's throwing out that week. The idea is that by posting publicly, and keeping a record, you're more likely to be aware of the food in your house, and try to avoid wasting any! This seems like a good idea to me, so I'm going to join the group of people who post with Kristen. After all, not wasting food has got to be good for the environment, right? Not to mention the pocketbook!

I went through my fridge and found asparagus, broccoli, a bit of yogurt, and a few cherries and strawberries that needed to be thrown out. I'm not someone who thinks that after the best-before date the food turns to poison...but the yogurt was best before April 15, and had some really interesting yellow and green mold growing on it. There was maybe one serving of yogurt left in the container. As for the produce...I just forgot about it for awhile and now it's not edible (unless you happen to like slimy and gross-smelling asparagus....I don't). However, since I went through the fridge I was able to see that a few of the cherries and strawberries were starting to go bad, and that inspired me to clean the rest of them and get them in ready-to-eat format in the fridge. Food Waste Friday is going to save me from wasting the rest of the fruit! And now I'm having cherries for dessert after lunch instead of Mr. Christie Chunky Chocolate Chip Cookies. It's probably for the best. :)

Here's a picture of my food waste. All the produce went into the compost, and the plastic yogurt container was recyclable. The only items that went into the garbage were the produce bags.


I couldn't find any specific studies showing how much food Canadians waste on average, but I did find an interesting article in the Toronto Star. It seems that 27%-33% of food is thrown out in America and the United Kingdom, with similar amounts seeming to hold true in Toronto. Some food waste is inevitable (apple core, melon rind, etc..) but they're saying that 1/4 to 1/3 of the food thrown out is untouched or unopened, and 61% of the food waste could have been eaten if the consumers had planned better (like what I'm throwing out this week). That's a lot of energy to grow the food, ship the food to consumers, package the food, and then dispose of the food (and if it ends up in landfills instead of compost, that's how methane gas gets created).