This post is by Jamie Wright, a junior at Loyola Academy. 

 

 

 

Food.  We all know it’s a basic need for life. When people are fed, they can move on with their daily activities. Sadly though not many people think of what bad things can come from food. One major issue is waste.

In one year, the average U.S. citizen will generate 474 pounds of food waste. That waste gets sent to the landfill where it releases methane as it breaks down, a super strong greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.

Many people may not that food waste is an environmental issue or, more likely, they don’t know how to fix it. Well I’m here to say that it is super easy!

Food waste may be one of the main space consumers in landfills, but it is the easiest to take care of!

Some common mistakes that lead to food waste are:

Push it to the back. When you come home from grocery shopping, do you just push everything in the refrigerator to the back and put the new stuff in the front?
Grabbing everything. If something is on sale, or free, even though you have no idea what to do with it, you still grab it!
Pondering over food. If you see that something has been around a while and needs to be eaten, take it out and look at it. Think about it. But then you put it back in the fridge so that you can think about it for a few more days. Repeat.
Eating the new food first. If you already have a type of fresh produce, like fruit, and you buy more before the first container is done, do you just go and eat the newer ones first? I know, the newer ones look so much better! I’m sure you’ll go back to eat the older ones later in the week.

Instead, you can use the following tips to reduce food waste at your house:

Turn it into garden food. Some food waste is unavoidable, so why not set up a compost bin for fruit and vegetable peelings? In a few months you will end up with rich, valuable compost for your plants.

Buy what you need. Buy loose fruits and vegetables instead of prepacked, then you can buy exactly the amount you need

Don’t throw it away! Fruit that is just going soft can be made into smoothies or fruit pies. Vegetables that are starting to wilt can be made into soup

Be a smarter shopper. Don’t bring so much food into your home that you cannot eat it before it goes bad

Use up your leftovers.  Instead of scraping leftovers into the bin, why not use them for tomorrow’s ingredients? A bit of tuna could be added to pasta and made into a pasta bake. A tablespoon of cooked vegetables can be the base for a crock pot meal.

This isn’t just something to do at home. You can bring these ideas to your school! At Loyola Academy High School we had our own experience of having Zero Waste:

– We made posters and put them up in our cafeteria to promote the idea of having a zero waste lunch
– We sold reusable lunch bags to eliminate plastic bag use and other wasteful materials like plastic or brown paper bags
– We performed a study on how much food and garbage was thrown away in a day out of our cafeteria. Lets just say there was a lot of reusable garbage headed off to the landfills that day.