Shop More to Waste Less?
As you know, we've been thinking about our food buying habits after we had to throw away everything in our packed freezer after a power outage thanks to Hurricane Harvey. I'm happy to say that one month later the freezer only contains a box of popsicles.
So what have we been doing? Well, we are consciously buying groceries a week at a time. So more store visits... but less extra stuff. More planned purchases and less buying on a whim. This may already be the norm for many people, but it's a new mode of operation for us.
In the past, we would often go to the grocery store with just a basic list and expect to get ideas for meals while shopping. Well we all know it doesn't always play out that way. So we ended up buying too much fresh veggies or too much meat. When those lofty meal ideas didn't pan out over the next few days, the veggies went in the trash and the meat moved to the freezer.
Now we create a menu for the week and buy only what we need. Like I said, we know it's not a novel concept but it's a whole new way of thinking for us! We were buying too much so that we would have multiple options for what to cook at any given time. Plus, if there was a sale on frozen fish, we would buy more for later. Problem is when later came, we forgot what we had stashed away in the freezer.
Bottom line is that we have wasted so much less food in the past few weeks!
YG