This is a sponsored post on behalf of CEC about shrinking food waste in our homes and using the Food Matters Action Kit however all thoughts and ideas expressed are my own.
Lately, there have been so many things in life that feel like we have little or no control about, so I’ve decided to help my family focus on whatever things that we can. I heard about the Food Matters Food Waste Action Kit and since I’ve been worried about the amount of food we waste lately it is so helpful to find an easy tool that I use in my home with my kids.
Wasting food also impacts climate change and the environment and with the fires we’ve seen on the West Coast in the past few weeks, Seattle has felt the effects of climate change with air so heavy with smoke that it’s difficult to breathe. If shrinking the amount of food we waste can help with climate change, this is definitely something we can and need to try.
Shrinking Food Waste with the Food Matter Action Kit
The Food Matters Action Kit site is free to use and has activities that range from ages 5-13 and there are more for ages 14-25 as well. You could use these activities at home or you might use these lesson plans for helping to teach about food waste in schools. There are also a ton of simple tips and resources that you can use without the lesson plans, resources like where to find a Food Is Free Growing Community or how to connect places with excess food to people who need it with an app like Food Rescue US.
For my family, learning about the negative impact we create in the world with the food we throw out and having resources on hand to immediately make changes felt really empowering. We learned that we need to plan our shopping trips ahead, check our kitchen for what we already can use before we buy anything else, and see if there are any creative ways we can use parts of food that we aren’t already using. A good thing we are doing right now is composting but a lot of what we compost is probably avoidable too. Are you composting in your house too? We also have a garden and this year we planted peas, beans and tomatoes.
We waste so much food.
We waste food like the produce that we buy and forget to eat before it gets bad. The last bits of cereal or pasta in bags that aren’t enough to make a meal hide in the back of our cupboards until they finally seem old enough to throw away when we do a major clean. We always think we’re going to eat the leftovers from our takeout but sometimes we don’t feel like eating the same thing twice in a row and then forget about the container in the fridge because we have SO many other things piled up. These day to day wastes might not seem like a lot, but over time they totally add up.
One activity we tried from the Food Matters Action Kit was a food waste audit. It is really astounding when you see how much food a family can waste in a day or even in a week. In Seattle we compost any food scraps but when we looked at how much we put on the curb each week, it made us think about how much food we buy that we are not actually consuming. And after seeing what we waste in just OUR home, it’s not hard to see that as a collective group we waste about 1/3 of all food that we produce in the world. We can buy less. We can freeze our leftovers. We can use our food in creative ways. Wasting food is avoidable.
And it costs us so much money!
I recently blogged about reducing the amount of money I spend on coffee in coffee shops so I can use that money to invest. But another way to find savings is to think about how we waste food and plan for what we buy. I’m starting to wonder what we could buy or save for if we didn’t throw out so much wasted food.
So are you concerned about wasting food too?
You can check out the Food Matters Action Kit or even sign up to share your food waste journey and earn badges online. You could watch a video about “Ugly Food” that often gets thrown out before it even makes it to the stores. If you tried these things, did you learn anything about how you waste food in your home? And if you have any other ideas on how to help shrink food waste in our communities, please let me know in the comments below.
Terumi Pong is a Seattle-based family travel writer and mom of twin teenage boys. She loves coffee and pastries, shopping local and looking for greener ways to live. She is also known as Scout’s mom (Scout is a 5ish pound little black yorkie-poo)
This is something we have been trying to be good about too – fruit seems to go bad so quickly, so if I bought too much & they didn’t eat enough, I’ve been trying to catch it before it’s totally bad & freeze the fruit for smoothies later; I need to try that with spinach & other greens that get mushy but still usable for frozen smoothies.