Americans throw away a quarter of our food uneaten, which translates into serious wasted cash over time. The Guardian compiled an excellent list of ways to shop smarter so you end up buying what you need, and eating what you buy.
- Make A List! Shopping lists top every saving strategy we offer, and for good reason. Lists make for routinized, disciplined shopping.
- Don’t Fear An Empty Fridge: Food grows mold, not interest. An empty fridge is a strong sign that your buying matches your consumption.
- Approach Deals Skeptically: Just because an item screams “Two for One!” doesn’t mean that you need two. Make sure the item is something that you’ll use, and something that won’t expire quickly.
- Avoid Supermarkets For Perishables: Buy your vegetables, meats, and fish at local establishments. You’ll spend less per visit, while honing your comparison shopping skills. In our neighborhood, the Korean vegetable stand is usually 30% cheaper than the supermarket around the corner.
- Buy Non-Perishables In Bulk: If you can store them, buy your pasta and rice in bulk. Just don’t try to buy more than one bag at a time.
- Buy Quality Products: Somewhat counterintuitive for those who focus exclusively on the bottom line, but if you pay more for a high-quality ingredient, you’re less likely to let it go to waste.
- Grow Your Own Herbs And Salad: Herbs and salad expire quickly in the fridge. If you have the space, grow your own and save.
- Buy Whole Vegetables: Bagged lettuce? Washed carrots? Like any vegetable, they start to decompose as soon as they’re processed.
- Be Storage Savvy: Keep your food fresh with proper storage. If you’re a fresh fruit lover, invest in an ethylene gas guardian to stave off spoilage.
- Plan Your Meals: Planning is a key part of list building, and one of the best ways to prevent abandoned foodstuffs from clogging up your fridge.
- Cook! Don’t just follow recipes. Real cooks now how to whip that extra bit of coconut milk or leftover celery into a tasty meal.
- Cook In Bulk: Since you’re already at the stove, double the recipe and save the leftovers.
- Use Your Freezer: Freezers are more efficient when they’re full, so fill ‘em up.
- Learn To Love Leftovers: Mmm, leftovers! But seriously, don’t throw away perfectly good food.
- Watch Your Portions: The less you eat, the less you spend. If you have trouble eyeballing portions, consider buying a scale.
- Learn From Your Parents: Your pappy’s pappy would smack you silly for your wasteful ways. Says Sheila Tremaine, 81, “We never threw anything away, because if you didn’t use everything up you had nothing to eat. People just seem to have lost that skill.”
- Rediscover Packed Lunches: Dust off that old He-Man lunch box and take your meals to work. Why waste $5.95 on a lunch special when you can eat from your own fridge?
- Equip Yourself: “Make your own bread. It’s quick, easy and so much better tasting than shop-bought. It’s also much cheaper. Make your own ice cream, it’s a doddle. Invest in a mincing machine as an attachment to a food processor, and turn the leftover roast lamb into a base for shepherd’s pie. While you’re at it, invest in a sausage stuffer and ask your butcher for some sausage skins when you buy the pork.”
- Don’t Trust Use-By Dates: If it isn’t soft cheese, pate, seafood or processed meat, then it will last for a while. “Chicken, raw meats and fish will all look and smell unpleasant long before they’re actively unsafe (as long as you cook it thoroughly, chicken, for example, is good for at least a week past its sell-by date). Apples last for months; potatoes are fine as long as you chop the green shoots off before cooking; tins and jars will last decades if not centuries; hard cheese is indestructible; and dry foods will last for years too.”
- Become A Freegan: If all else fails, ditch your wasteful ways and become one with your urban landscape.
Waste not … [The Guardian]
(Photo: Getty)
@synergy: Do you have an ethnic grocery around? A salvage grocery? I’ve seen both in country communities so small and rural they don’t have their own City Hall. Sometimes they surprise you; you can often score really good stuff that the local yokels have no idea how to use.
hard cheese: dampen a paper towel with vinegar, wrap it around the cheese, put it in a zip top plastic bag. staves off mold for months if you refresh the vinegar when it starts to dry out. you’ll never taste it
i keep my bread in the freezer since i toast it before eating. i’ve never noticed a problem unless i try to thaw it and eat it without toasting. then it has the texture of cardboard. in the humidity here it molds in the fridge too fast. if bread goes dry you can
a] wrap it in a damp papertowel and microwave it for a few seconds. how long depends on the size of the piece
b] use it for garlic bread
c] throw it in the food processor or blender [or a bag and use a rolling pin] and make breadcrumbs for casseroles or breading your chicken
here in the southeast [nc] i have a beast outside my front door that my friends and family all refer to as ‘the rosemary kraken’ it’s a 4′ wide shrubbery of rosemary. when i trim it to keep it off the sidewalk i can’t even give it all away. my sister has one too, as well as a yard full of basil and cilantro that have gone feral. she put some seeds down in regular potting soil in a raised bed about 2′x4′ a few years ago and now she doesn’t even bother drying the extra, just lets it grow like weeds. my mother once had to dry 3 pounds of oregano that got loose in the sandy soil of her pool enclosure in florida. find out what grows best in your climate and learn how to cook with it. a packet of seeds us usually less than a dollar and those particular plants either [rosemary] grow as perennials, or reseed themselves with no care at all around here.
a $3 cherry tomato plant provided me with more cherry tomatoes than i could eat one summer with nothing but water and sunshine.
if you can get an OLDER copy of the joy of cooking, please read the ‘know your ingredients’ section. it’s a long chapter but i learned to substitute what i had on hand instead of buying new stuff i wouldn’t otherwise use in dozens of recipes. [the newest version of this book has a severely truncated section on ingredients]
i always keep a bag of barley on hand. save all my veggie and cooked meat scraps [doesn't matter what kind, all the ugly bits] and even meat juice/drippings from the pan and store them in the freezer. freezer burn doesn’t even matter. when the container or baggie is full i dump them, the bag of barley, some water and boullion cubes [enough water for the barley plus some, it's a matter of taste] into the crock pot on low for a few hours. sometimes i add some leftover rice, a bag of frozen peas/corn/mixed whatever veg you like toward the end of cooking. if you have tomato paste or whatever else you might think is tasty, go ahead and add it. i lived on ‘leftovers stew’ for years working for minimum wage.
an evenly cut tomato/onion/apple half will store neatly on a small salad plate with the cut end down for days without getting slimy.
when i worked at a donut shop i got to take home stale donuts for free. i kept them in the freezer and microwaved them right before eating for about ten seconds. like fresh out of the oven!
“Just because an item screams “Two for One!” doesn’t mean that you need two.”
Um, maybe I’m crazy but isn’t two for one the same as buy one get one free? It would be crazy/stupid to pass on something that you’re getting for free. If you were going to buy one of something anyways, for god’s sake take the free one, don’t let the store keep it. If you really won’t use it, give it away or donate it.
Oh and that photo? If all men drank milk that way they’d get laid way more often. Hubba hubba…
“Keep an empty fridge” runs counter to energy-saving tips that the Consumerist has published recently. Also, every single thing in an empty fridge will spoil quickly if you lose power, whereas a full fridge will keep itself cool much longer. If nothing else, you should load up the fridge with beverages, one of the non-perishables that you can stock up on. But “keep an empty fridge” as a rule is not a good one.
@katyggls: Many stores still require you to buy two to get the special. Walgreens has a similar thing where you can get, say, two for five dollars, but just one is regular price of $2.99.
Wait… If Americans on average throw away 25% of their food… Dear god… Think of how many people actually throw away like at least 50%…
@katyggls: Yeah, but a lot of stores jack up the prices on the “One”, so something that’s 2.00 each is suddenly 3.75 each and Two for One!
Some places even make that One be 4.25.
One nice thing about using local markets, especially farmer’s markets, is that the produce is better (so you waste less) and it keeps longer. Greens from the grocery store are long since dissolved into goo while my farmer’s market greens are crisp and going strong. Five minutes of prep with a salad spinner and a big bowl and you’re all set for quick salads for the week.
@IfThenElvis: “Is it cheaper after you factor in time, equipment, ingredients and gas/electricity? What’s the break even point? “
Probably, yes. I’ve seen breakdowns including electricity, etc. Timing is up to you. But ingredients = much cheaper than store-bought bread and natural gas for oven = less than gas to drive to supermarket (though never do I really make a bread-only run!).
If you have a stand mixer, it’s super-easy. It takes about five minutes to get everything mixed up (and with the stand mixer, you can get the kitchen clean while it kneads all on its own!). Then it rises, you punch (so therapeutic) and shape, it rises, and you bake. Total time invested is less than 15 minutes — however, you do have to have time when you’re hanging around the house for a couple three hours to give it attention now and then. If you’re never home, then no, it’s a stupid way to get bread. But if you hang around the house on Saturday, it’s very easy.
(Also, I usually bake baguettes — I’m scared to try loaf pans — and they only take 18 minutes and my oven heats up really fast.)
We store homemade bread in a covered cake platter. Works basically like a breadbox and delays spoilage.
@Angryrider: “If Americans on average throw away 25% of their food”
It’s not actually specific to the U.S. … between 15% and 25% of food taken home for consumption spoils just about everywhere in the world. Between 1/3 and 1/2 is lost from the fields (to critters, pests, weather, etc.), and another large percentage spoils in the distribution system (processing plants, supermarkets, etc.). Only something like 40 to 50% of food available for harvest makes it to being eaten, and that’s in countries with good distribution systems.
@speedwell:
I took “two for one” in the OP to mean buy one get one free, not “only get a sale price if you buy more than one item”. I don’t think that’s what the term “two for one” means. Maybe it’s just badly described in the post. Besides, your example doesn’t seem like such a ripoff to me. I think there are very few cases where having two of something is a rampant waste of resources. Obviously, if your buying ten of something just because there’s a sale when you wouldn’t have bought it in the first place, then yeah, you’re an idiot. But if something I’m going to buy anyways is cheaper because I buy two of them, in most cases that’s a good deal.
@Squot:
Again I’d like to know where you all are shopping. I shop at Food Lion and Walmart and have never seen them jack up the prices on a buy one get one free deal. I don’t believe most reputable grocery stores are that shady.
I save a lot each month by making my spoiled-rotten-puppy’s treats. I buy hamburger on sale when it hits $1.99/lb, and save all my stale (not moldy) bread in the freezer. Mix it all together with some garlic and bake mini-meatballs – about 3lbs per baking sheet, usually two or three rounds (25 mins @ 325). I keep them in the freezer in a big bag and just pop one or two out when she’s been a good girl (which, according to her, is quite often). It sure beats $3.99/lb for the Beggin strips or other treats!
I love tip #4. The veggies and fruit at my local grocery store are pretty expensive. I spent $1.83 on red leaf lettuce, a carrot, and 2 cucumbers at the Korean deli right down the street. The same things cost around $4 at the grocery store.
What the heck is a doddle, and what is it doing in my homemade ice cream?
Bread freezes easily and defrosts quickly, so that’s one strategy.
And if you cook and have a varied repertoire, when you shop, you can mentally put menus and recipes together rather easily, based on what’s available and on special.
And sharing is nice, too. I bought a whole sockeye salmon the other day, had them cut it into fillets and steaks, shared some with my dear old mom, and got several meals out of the rest. Cook it all before it goes bad, and make salad or salmon cakes out of the leftovers.
But if you don’t cook, you won’t save. Period. The end. Drive carefully!
@Canino: Um, herbs make things taste good.
According to researchers (Cook’s Illustrated and Harold McGee), bread actually stales faster in the refrigerator than at room temperature. Freezing it, however, works pretty well, especially if you’re going to be toasting or warming it anyway. Bread that has hardened up a bit can be softened up by steaming it (cover it with a damp paper towel and microwave it).
If you buy bulk stuff like flour, rice, and beans, they will last better if kept in airtight and lightproof containers rather than simply the thin paper or plastic bags of original packaging; keeping them cool–lower than room temp–will help as well. Flour and nuts especially can taste pretty nasty when they go off, so check the old stuff before putting it in something.
“Buy Whole Vegetables: Bagged lettuce? Washed carrots? Like any vegetable, they start to decompose as soon as they’re processed.”
I buy the prepared “spring mix” stuff as instead of just, say, Romaine, you get a cornucopia of different lettuces and other greens, much more phytochemically awesome than just lettuce.
Unfortunately despite what the “sell by” date says, lately the shit starts rotting a day after I open it. I bought a big bucket of it on Saturday with a “sell by” of July 19 and soon as I opened it got a whiff of stink and had to pick out the gross bits. I’ve returned plenty of it and it looks like this one will have to go back too, if I can find the receipt. problem appears to be too much moisture in it, because sometimes it’s pretty dry and lasts a long time, but if it’s all wet then it rots quickly. I even pointed this minor fact out to Earthbound Farms on their so-called feedback page but never heard back.
but overall I hate vegetables and this stuff is about the only way I get my greens, and I hate washing and chopping shit, so I guess I’ll keep buying it.
Another cost saving tip is a surplus bread store. I’m lucky in that there’s one just 2 blocks away, which makes for a nice little stroll now and then. You can buy day old bread products and freeze them until you’re ready to use them. It’s a great way to save money. I can typically get 3 loaves of bread there for the cost of one brand-name loaf. Never mind the savings on rolls and other stuff.
I actually save money without a list . . . I’m much more ambitious when planning meals than I should be. I just come up with a rough plan of what I want to eat for the next few days and wing it.
This goes hand in hand with the point about learning to cook. If you can turn a box of pasta and the contents of your spice rack into a great meal, you’ve got it, and it’s not nearly as hard to get there as it sounds.
@geeniusatwrok: Have you tried throwing the bagged lettuces into a salad spinner to get the moisture off of them? I’ve found that lettuce keeps longer in the spinner than in a bag or other container- there’s enough moisture inside to keep the lettuce from getting all dessicated, but not so much that it promotes spoiling.
I like most of these ideas, but I don’t trust the meat thing. If it smells bad and is past the expiration, it’s going out. I’ve gotten food poisoning way too many times to take the risk.