Food Wastage

By: Jill Blakeway, M.S. L. Ac. | Author's Archive | Bio

Back in July I wrote a blog entry about how shocked I was to find that as a nation we waste $43 billion dollars of edible food each year. It is one of the posts that people talk to me about when they visit us here at the YinOva Center, so I think it struck a cord with many of you. You can read it here.

In these trying economic times I thought it might be worth drawing your attention to it and giving you an update on my own family’s attempts to avoid wasting food. Amazingly enough just by doing the things mentioned in the article we have now reduced our weekly food costs by almost half. We still buy good quality, organic food, but we buy much less of it. It makes me realize how much money we were wasting buying large, prepackaged containers of food, most of which ended up going off before we ate them.

The most useful change we made was using the left-over meat and veggies in the fridge to make soup which we eat at work during the week. This has a triple benefit – we use up leftovers, we eat healthier and we’ve stopped spending money on take out.

There is so much pleasure in growing vegetables, making soup or mending clothes. Far from feeling frugal and as if we are doing without, I believe that consuming less can make our lives more enjoyable.

Photograph
© Dušan Zidar | Dreamstime.com