![]() ![]() I first saw this at the library, read some, and decided to buy it. So if you're going to read a book on reducing kitchen waste, that's the one I'd recommend. But the other thoughts on making bits and bobs of food items into something delightful are better covered in An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace. The food storage stuff might be helpful for some people. Honestly, the audit is a good idea for most homes. There's also a really long and fairly comprehensive index on how to store various items and how to use them up when they're a little past their prime. ![]() Not "it was too old," but "I didn't feel like eating it the night I was supposed to cook it." And based on the results of said audit, Gunders recommends either religiously meal planning at the time of your weekly shopping trip, or eschewing the weekly trip for shopping trip in favor of buying just what you want to eat today and tomorrow. Gunders recommends a ruthless audit, making note of every piece of food pitched in the trash for two weeks, with explicit reasons why those food items got pitched. ![]() ![]() One is that the biggest way to avoid throwing food in the trash is to only buy the food you're going to eat. There are a couple of big take-aways from this book. But I did highlight and Post-It the crap out of this book. Maybe the added space is for margin notes? I have no idea. Seriously, for a book dedicated to reducing waste, side margins of an inch, and top margins of two inches seem startlingly hypocritical, or at least just dumb. One thing about this book that annoyed the crap out of me - the margins. This book also has motivated me to make two grocery trips per week instead of one: one big one to coupon and buy all the nonperishable stuff (or stuff that will last for a month in the fridge) and a second, smaller trip to buy shorter-lived ingredients, closer to when I will be using them. The section on food safety was very useful. I am a big believer in leftovers, mostly because I find cooking and dishwashing to be the least rewarding things I can do, so I skipped right over the section with the portion control guides. It has helpful recipes to help you figure out how to use up leftovers or food you don't know how to use up, as well as a forty page directory on storing common food items. So, Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook is right up my alley. Plus, I am extremely frugal (my mother uses the word "miserly"), and money wasted in this manner makes me head-spinningly, green-pea-soup-hurlingly angry. But food waste? There's no good in food waste. I even believe that, used VERY sparingly, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, and fertilizers can actually be better for the environment by allowing for more intensive agriculture so we don't have to use as much water or cut down as many rainforests, plow under as many prairies, or convert as many wetlands to grow food (not antibiotics though, because I don't want to die of drug resistant salmonella, thankyouverymuch). I think the whole thing about GMOs has the same scientific basis as the antivax movement - that is to say, none. Look, I am a tree hugger, and the fact that my tiny little borough does not recycle has prompted me to look at other ways to be more environmentally conscious, including by cutting back on food waste, but I am not enough of an environmentalist that I bother with organic. That's higher food prices through artificially inflated demand, which hurt all of us, but especially the most vulnerable. That's greenhouse gas emissions (according to author Dana Gunders, it's equivalent to the emissions of 33 million passenger vehicles), fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, antibiotics, and hormones used - all for nothing. That's, on average, $120 per month for a family of four, thrown away. At the time this book was published (2015), 40% of the food that was produced in the United States was being thrown away. Did you know that sour milk is safe to use? Or that potatoes that have gone a little soft are fine, but once they've started sprouting shoots, they are toxic? Or the right way to stock your fridge so as to maximize the freshness of the food contained therein? I did not, until I read Waste Free Kitchen Handbook: A Guide to Eating Well and Saving Money by Wasting Less Food. ![]()
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