When I initially thought about doing trash for this inquiry project, I was thinking about landfill garbage. As I have read more about household waste though, the internet has constantly pointed me to a secondary culprit that I should be watching . . . food waste!

The Stats

Around Victoria, I have noticed billboards and bus stop ads for “Love Food, Hate Waste”. Bored on the bus one day I took a look at their site and learned some really startling facts:

• The average household in Canada loses $1,300 to food waste each year
• 63% of food that people throw out could have been eaten
• 6.9 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions come from Canada’s food waste per year

The Waste

Looking around my house, I started to think about my relationship with food waste. When I thought about the food waste that I create and have created in the past, I separated it into three categories:

1. Prepared Food Waste – AKA Uneaten leftovers
2. Partial Use Food Waste – AKA Throwing out the broccoli stem
3. Unprepared Food Waste – AKA Condiments/veggies that go bad before use

Prepared food waste is the area that I think that I am already pretty good at limiting. When I meal prep, I put the meals into single-serve containers. If I accidently cook too much, it goes right into the freezer for a rainy day. I am pretty religious about eating through my meal prep and freezing it if I end up eating out and don’t need it.

The other kinds of food waste I am less consistent with. I would say my personal area where I need the most improvement in is the unprepared food waste – especially the condiments I forget about and leave to go bad in the fridge and the stems of things like cilantro which I know are edible, but I throw out anyway.

The Challenge

For this week’s meal prep, I am going to challenge myself to use the things in my fridge that are near going bad and only supplement from the grocery store with what’s needed. I had some quinoa, canned black beans, and canned tomatoes in the pantry and in the fridge I had some vegetables that needed to get used pretty quickly, including onion, garlic, broccoli, and green onions. Planning my meal prep around what I already had, the only thing I needed to buy to make vegetable chili was sweet potatoes! In the future, if I had more time, I could have saved the vegetable scraps and made stock, but I’m taking things one step at a time.