Waste Not: How to Stop Throwing Away So Much Food

When I started keeping track of the uneaten veggies, fruits, and leftovers we threw away each week, I was horrified. (Try it: You won't believe how much you waste.) Here's how my family learned to shop smarter, save money, and become friends with our fridge again.

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I began to notice how much food my family threw away last summer, when I was buying lots of fruit, fresh veggies, and meats for grilling. All were full of juicy promise when I dropped them into the grocery cart. A couple of weeks later I'd open the fridge and discover some part of a past haul quietly liquefying in the crisper. One morning, in a bag containing some rotting spinach, I found a 16-day-old supermarket receipt. Of the $41 I'd spent, more than $10 had gone into the garbage rather than our stomachs.

This was infuriating, expensive, and environmentally indefensible. But as it turns out, my family's outrageous waste is the American norm. Most households throw away about 12 percent of all the food they bring home and 25 percent of the vegetables. The annual tab, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, runs from $1,400 to $2,300 for the average family of four.

"That's it," I told my husband, Rob. "From now on we throw nothing away. If we buy it, we eat it."

"I'm scared," he replied. I don't think he was being sarcastic.

The Pantry Challenge

I was raised to keep a full fridge, freezer, and pantry. But my larder no longer looked plentiful -- it looked profligate. I decided to launch our no-waste experiment with a shelf-clearing challenge: For a week we'd eat just out of what we had on hand. That meant stir-frying three times to use up every single wilting carrot and zucchini, finally digging out that hunk of mystery meat in the freezer, and opening plenty of canned goods that were bumping up against their expiration dates.

I've always considered myself the type who'll eat anything. But when I perceive a food as being old -- even if it's unexpired, frozen, and perfectly fine -- I've discovered that I turn on it. So the first night of our challenge, when Rob pulled an ancient box of creamed spinach out of the freezer, I shuddered at the thought of eating it. Psychologist Rachel Herz, PhD, author of That's Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion, confirmed that my queasiness was all in my head. "With common foods that you know are okay, you just need to suck it up," she said. So I held my breath, dug in -- and the creamed spinach tasted fine. From then on, when I was iffy about an aging food, Rob would be the one to cook it.

We also got stricter with our 5-year-old son, who'd balk at a slightly spotty banana or any apple with a bruise. (He's not alone: American consumers now consider slight cosmetic imperfections that our parents wouldn't have blinked at to be spoilage.) "Think of the Pilgrims," I told him. "They were happy to have any food at all!"

We were so pleased with the results of our pantry challenge that we kept it going past the first week, then the second, and into the third and fourth. Our dinners weren't elegant, but eating from our shelves and freezer saved us $400 in a month and primed us for the next step: becoming smarter shoppers.

Supermarket Savvy

Our pantry challenge uncovered, among other items, a languishing tube of anchovy paste (bought for a recipe I never made), a bag of frozen hake (because it was on sale), and several cans of corn I thought our son would like (when he was 3) -- all proof that Rob and I are hopelessly undisciplined food shoppers.

"Most of us cook from a recipe, whether written down or in our head," says Ronna Welsh, a former restaurant chef who now runs Purple Kale Kitchenworks, a culinary school for home cooks in Brooklyn, New York. "So when we lack an ingredient, we don't improvise -- we end up buying it for that one-time use." Welsh's words hit home. In recent years, as I've cooked less, my kitchen confidence has plummeted. So instead of throwing in a dash of this or a pinch of that or swapping out one ingredient for something else, I've become a recipe slave: I follow the directions to a tee, right down to sending my husband out for fresh herbs if we only have dried or a can of tomato paste when I need only a tablespoon. Then the remaining parsley, or thyme, or tomato paste, eventually ends up in the garbage.

A similar fate awaits many "cupboard castaways," as Brian Wansink, PhD, director of a food lab at Cornell University, has dubbed them. In one study Wansink asked 412 families to unearth a food item they'd bought at least six months earlier and explain why they still had it. His discovery? Most were special purchases, acquired for a specific occasion. When that passed, the food rotated to the back of the shelf to die a slow death. "This kind of waste is really misplaced optimism," Wansink told me. "You think, 'Oh, this is cool' or 'I'll serve that at a dinner party,' but once you get the item home, you either don't know what to do with it or forget its original purpose."

With Rob and me, it was more than buying foods we wanted to serve but never got around to making (though we definitely did that). We were also just plain buying too much -- which is far and away the biggest cause of home food waste, says Jonathan Bloom, author of American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half Its Food. A fear of hunger seems to be wired into the human brain; research shows we tend to overestimate pantry shortages and under-remember overages. So when doubt hits in the grocery aisle (Do we have cream cheese?) we'll stock up just in case -- and then find a full tub sitting in the fridge.

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