10 Ways to Reduce Food Waste For The Newbie Cook

Lessons learned from my mistakes.

Julie X
7 min readNov 26, 2019

18 months into cooking my meals, I’ve developed an internal system for staying on top of our produce to reduce food waste. But it has taken tossing moldy bagels, mushrooms and blueberries and countless limp celeries for me to get here. Yet, I still wasted some cheese last week!

I wish I’d learned how long the different food lasts when I was growing up so I didn’t have to learn with my gut feeling and rely on google searches. However, even without experience and scientific knowledge of shelf lives, there are ways to reduce food waste.

Why is it important to reduce food waste?

Photo by Scott Warman on Unsplash

Globally, a third of the food produced is wasted every year, and the richer a nation is, the more food is wasted by consumers. Why? Because they have better buying power and food is more affordable. It’s a cruel irony.

Food waste is a huge problem. When we waste food, we not only waste the food we throw away, we also waste the resources that went into producing (like water and fertilizer or food for farm animals) and transporting them.

Eventually, food wastes that end up in landfills can’t decompose properly because they’re wrapped in plastic bags and buried beneath layers of trash…

--

--

Julie X

A minimalistic millennial trying to make her life mean something.