Cut Your Grocery Bill by 27%!

Like many families, we have been concerned about rising food costs so have been taking several steps to keep our food bill down, or at least prevent it from rising further. We’ve talked about one of the steps here but want to discuss another that helps both to limit the amount we spend as well as our impact on the earth. Ready? All you need to do is eat all the food you buy.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? In fact, it is silly to think anyone would spend money on a product only to throw it in the garbage. But that is exactly what we (and families across the country) were doing with the food we bought.

Earlier this year the New York Times featured an article that illustrated the amount of food an average American family tosses in the trash each month. The total share for a family of four came to 122 pounds or 27% of the food they purchase. Yikes!

My first thought, I admit, was that we weren’t that wasteful. But then I started paying attention. There were the zucchinis lost at the bottom of the produce drawer until they became mush. And the pasta sauce marooned in the back of the frig, growing hair. Then there were the half-eaten lunches that would come back from school. It all added up to way too much wasted food – and money!

And that is not all. Whenever we threw food in the garbage, we were also chucking everything that was used in its production. The fuel, the fertilizer, the water, everything used to plant, grow, and ship the food was also wasted. Since the food was going into the trash, it was headed to the landfill. There decomposing food releases methane. This greenhouse gas is more potent than even CO2, trapping 23 times as much heat in the atmosphere as the same amount of CO2, according to the EPA.

Knowing this helped us to put our food waste into perspective. We weren’t just throwing away a half-eaten apple, we were throwing away everything that went into that apple making its way to our table while also adding to the release of greenhouse gas. This knowledge helped us see our food shopping in a new light and aided us in becoming aware of our waste. This awareness was the first step to decreasing our food waste. I’ll write about some other concrete steps we took tomorrow.

For more information on how wasting food contributes to the global water crisis, see “Saving Water: From Field to Fork – Curbing Losses and Wastage in the Food Chain.” It is an eye-opening read.

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