If going through the fridge and tossing rotten fruit, old leftovers, and stale bread is part of your weekly ritual, you’re not alone.
Here are some scary statistics from the National Resource Defense Council:
- About 40 percent of all food in the U.S. goes to waste.
- The average American wastes about $28 to $43 in food each month, roughly 20 pounds of food.
- Broken down, about 17 percent of dairy, 20 percent of vegetables, 15 percent of fruit, 18 percent of the grains, 25 percent of seafood, and 33 percent of the meat you buy goes to waste.
Do the math and according to the NRDC you’re throwing as much as $516 in your kitchen trashcan every year.
But you don’t have to.
1. Keep fresh herbs in the plastic bag
Normally I toss the thin plastic produce bags I get at the grocery when I get home.
But there’s one exception: Fresh herbs last longer when stored in the vegetable crisper section of my fridge inside the plastic bag. When I get home, I wash and dry the herbs, put them back in the plastic bag, and seal the bag closed with a twist tie. They’ll last at least a week.
2. Store onions in pantyhose
I learned this trick from my mother.
She would buy a bag of onions, put one onion in the foot of a pair of pantyhose, seal it off with a twist tie, add another onion, and repeat until the hose were full. Then she hung the hose from a nail inside the pantry.
Stored this way, the onions have more room to breathe and last a month or more.
3. Add rice to your seasonings
The high humidity where I live – Louisiana – causes my dry seasonings to clump together. Result: I used to toss at least a bottle per month.
Then I started using an old trick from my grandmother: I add four to 10 grains of dry rice to the bottle and shake. The dry rice keeps the seasonings from sticking together and they last six months or more.
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