Tag Archives: food waste

Five home hacks to reduce your food waste footprint

By Christi Demitz, Jenna Kaufman-Ross, Michigan State University Extension

 

In our modern culture of endless choices, food waste has become a hot topic among food policy advocates and environmental officials. According to the Food Waste Alliance, about 80 billion pounds of food are tossed in American landfills each year, which contributes to increased greenhouse gas emissions and billions of dollars wasted. If aggregated into one giant heap, this amount of wasted food would fill the Rose Bowl Stadium, which would make for a pretty pungent football game!

 

Fortunately, the USDA and EPA have teamed up in an effort to cut U.S. food waste in half by the year 2030. While this goal addresses over half of the food waste in landfills, it fails to address the nearly 50 percent of food waste generated by residential and consumer sectors. Therefore, it is important to recognize the steps we can take to reduce food waste. Below are five easy strategies for repurposing and revitalizing food right in your home kitchen. Such creative, simple solutions can help reduce personal food waste while consequently stretching your food budget!

  1. Look for inner beauty. When shopping for fruits and veggies, do not judge a book by its cover! Just because produce might look odd or unconventional, it is still as delicious and nutritious as its more traditionally shaped peers. Oftentimes these ugly veggies are deemed inedible by shoppers and left to rot in the store and eventually thrown away. Save the ugly produce! Reserve bizarre fruits for smoothies and jams. Chop up peculiar veggies for soups, stews, sauces and salads. You can oven roast them, or feature them whole in a crudité.  More and more companies, such as Imperfect Produce on the West Coast and Hungry Harvest on the East Coast, are hopping on the ugly produce bandwagon. Additionally, super markets such as Walmart have started discounting misshapen produce to lessen their food waste footprint. While such systematic initiatives have not yet sprouted in Michigan, take it upon yourself to be an ugly produce hero and rescue these poor edible outcasts. For more ugly inspiration, follow @UglyFruitandVeg on social media.
  2. Create a broth bag. This genius idea from The Kitchn.com gives purpose back to all those vegetable “odds and ends” and redirects them into flavor-boosters for soups, stews, stocks and sauces. When cutting up your vegetables, save those nubs, cobs, ends and tops and freeze them in a container or freezer bag for a later use. Otherwise demoted to the garbage heap, these odds and ends are filled with optimal flavor potential. For a decadent, next-level soup, add your leftover hard cheese rinds to the broth bag and freeze.
  3. Preserve your herbs. Chop your leftover herbs and freeze in ice cube trays topped with a bit of olive oil. Once frozen, pop them out and store in freezer bags for a later use. Drop cubes into sauces, soups, stews or any other time you are in the market for an herb-infused olive oil.
  4. When in doubt, make pesto. Pesto is traditionally a sauce made with basil, parmesan cheese, olive oil, pine nuts (or walnuts), garlic and lemon. Get creative by using kale, carrot tops or beet greens along with or instead of the basil.
  5. For all other food scraps, compost. You have heard of composting. You know, that cyclic concept of conserving all of your food scraps, coffee grounds, egg shells, peels and skins and turning them back into fertile soil for future growth. Though it sounds idyllic, it is oftentimes associated with smelly, rotting food, which can be a major barrier for those considering composting. Services such as Organicycle and other similar programs aim to eliminate that barrier and make composting about as hassle and smell-free as it gets with curbside pick-up for a low cost, and for those ambitious gardening folk out there, Michigan State University Extension offers programs and resources to manage your own compost pile!

We can all do our part to reduce food waste. Just employing a few of these tricks can cut back on your residential waste and might even save you a buck or two! For additional resources on food waste reduction, head to MSU Extension.

 

 

 

‘Cooking With Scraps’ dinner Nov. 15th with author Lindsay-Jean Hard at Reserve

By Jenn Galdes, Grapevine

 

As committed advocates to sustainability in the kitchen, the team at Reserve Wine & Food is thrilled to announce a special dinner with author Lindsay Jean-Hard, whose new book Cooking With Scraps will be released Oct. 30th, and is the #1 new release in the Budget Cooking section on Amazon.

 

“We make every effort we can in the kitchen to reduce waste, and through this dinner hope to share ideas and tips on how the home cook can do the same,” says executive chef Luke VerHulst.

 

The six-course paired dinner begins at 6:30pm on Thursday, Nov. 15th with a book signing and reception; seating is limited and the cost for the dinner is $75 per person (exclusive of tax and gratuity) and signed books will be available for a special price of $15.95 plus tax for purchase.

 

Call 616.855.9463 to reserve, or go here to purchase tickets.

 

The kitchen statistics are startling: roughly one-third of the food produced globally for human consumption gets lost or wasted, and Americans waste about a pound of food per person each day, with 40 percent of food in this country going uneaten. Lindsay-Jean Hard’s Cooking With Scraps provides 80 creative, delicious, and inspired recipes to help home cooks make use of their scraps.

 

By learning the basics behind transforming food waste into treasure, readers can take advantage of ingredients such as aging produce, cheese rinds, stale bread, and other oft-discarded foods to create budget-conscious, sustainable, and highly satisfying meals.

 

The menu, inspired by recipes in the book and prepared by chef Luke VerHulst follows:

  • Vanilla Glazed Beets & Greens, candied pecans, bleu cheese
    • Beet greens used, and peelings and trimmings from finished beets used to make a glaze
  • Roasted Winter Vegetable Galette, herb stem and cheese rind pesto
    • Pesto made from herb stems and cheese rinds
  • Glazed Pork Belly, tempuraed maitake mushroom, coddled egg, mushroom tea
    • Mushroom tea made from mushroom trimmings
  • Leek Top Cacio e Pepe*
  • Roasted Prime Rib, dill pickle brine potato salad*, wilted greens, roasted bone marrow demi
  • Fennel Panna Cotta, preserved lemon rind
    • Fennel tops and lemon rinds used

      Cauliflower mac and cheese

*indicates item made from recipe in book

 

Lindsay-Jean Hard received her Master’s in Urban Planning from the University of Michigan. Her education and passion for sustainability went on to inform and inspire her work in the garden, home, and community. The seeds of this book were planted in her Food52 column of the same name. Today she works to share her passion for great food and great communities as a marketer at Zingerman’s Bakehouse. She lives, writes, loves, and creates in Ann Arbor, Michigan.