Organize Your Kitchen
Is there anything more fun than organizing? Of course not. (Wait, what’s that? Not everyone uses alphabetizing as a relaxation technique? Huh.)
Well, take heart. Even if you don’t like organizing, you probably like food. So here is how to use organizing to find out how to waste less food!
Every year in the US, we waste approximately 429 pounds of food per person—that’s 31% of our available food supply. Meanwhile, 37.2 million of us are living in food insecure households, and wasted food ends up in landfills, where it produces methane as it breaks down. (This is all according to the EPA.)
That’s a lot of room for improvement! So let’s focus on ways to reduce food waste at home by organizing your kitchen. With any luck, it will also save you money and take some of the stress out of meal planning.
How to Waste less food by organizing
Let’s begin in the refrigerator!
First, and you knew this was coming: it’s cleaning time. Clean out your fridge, wipe down the shelves, compost sad produce, retire curling postcards stuck on with magnets…the whole nine yards. You know what to do. You’ve got this.
Going forward, when you bring food home, consider whether you can wash, dry, and prepare it immediately. It will save you time when cooking and can help the food last longer. It’s worth it to make this call item by item, though; for example, if you wash raspberries right away and then refrigerate them for later, they might be quicker to mold. If you’re not sure, google it.
Refrigerate your food in clear, lidded containers (such as these from Target). We actually first heard this idea from a friend in the dieting world. If you can see the food in your refrigerator, you’re more likely to remember it. And if you have easily visible pre-prepared carrot sticks, for example, you’ll remember to go for them instead of something less healthy when you open the fridge.
Next up, how to reduce household food waste in the pantry.
First, you guessed it, clean it out! Donate good, unexpired food that you are unlikely to use (be honest) to a local food drive.
When it comes to storage, we actually use clear containers outside of our refrigerator, too; our pantry is filled with mismatched glass jars and storage containers (like these storage containers from Target, for example). We were inspired to start doing this years ago by the book Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD by Susan Pinsky (here it is on Amazon, if you’re curious). Hear us out:
It lets us buy the amount we actually need in bulk (when it’s not covid times…); we just take the jars to the bulk food store and note the tare weights. That helps us reduce packaging waste too.
Even when we buy something in packaging, say flour, it only takes a few seconds to decant our purchase into the jar.
We can always see how much we have left at a glance; no guessing if we have enough flour to bake bread. No forgetting to add cereal to the shopping list.
It helps us organize by use, which makes our kitchen easy and efficient (another shout-out to Susan Pinsky for this tip!). For example, the jar of coffee is always next to the coffee maker, the jars of flour and sugar are always on the baking shelf, and the jars of cereal are always next to the cereal bowls on the breakfast shelf.
It reminds us to eat the food we have, because we can see it.
The airtight seals on the jars mean that food is fresher longer and better protected from flour moths, our nemeses. And fruit flies, our other nemeses.
It’s pretty, and sometimes pretty helps.
A simple, clear organizational strategy helps us see how to reduce food waste by buying less food overall and using what do buy after we have it. It has a definite impact on the amount of food we have to throw away.
Wait! Are we doing a perfect job at this? Full disclosure: Ahahahaha no. In fact, here is a picture of our real-world, work-in-progress kitchen, so you can see what we’re talking about. It’s not magazine-perfect or glamorous by any means, but we love to cook and eat, so it’s used often and well loved. And we have made a lot of progress over the past few years—every time we figure out just the right spot to add another clear jar, we can see the effects.
So think about how you use your kitchen and optimize your organization to support what you do. With the right organizational strategy for how to waste less food in effect, it will be easier than ever.
All organized? Another way to reduce food waste is to make homemade vegetable stock with your scraps. And here’s how to go plastic free in the kitchen while you’re at it.
