Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Best Practices in the Kitchen

[caleb]

There are a few ideas that are widely known: transition from thin film bags to reusable grocery and produce bags, store in reusable containers rather than disposable bags or plastic wrap, compost.

Beyond those ideas though, I'm mostly going on my own logic. It would not surprise me if that logic is flawed. (If I forego any plastic storage for a head of kale and it thereby wilts three days faster, am I actually reducing waste in practice? Etcetera.)

So, two questions:

Can anyone point me toward resources on best practices for waste reduction in the kitchen?

Does anyone have strategies to share that they've worked out?

[htwoopup]

Kind of an original recycle one...

To cut landfill etc our town (Ville de Mont Tremblant) has a program where they will deliver a big compost bin to your house and they charge a one time fee of around 30 dollars. Now all carrot peels, coffee grounds, apple cores, etc and paper towels go in there. Cut the bags of garbage down a lot and my wife says the dirt that she gets out of the bottom of it is awesome growing material.

[Todd Amunrud]

Drawstring Produce Bags - Cotton Gauze Full Size - Set of 5

We use the above for all produce and store them in the fridge drawers. We get a weekly share from our CSA and have little waste. If anything is lingering it goes into a soup-base of some sort and then frozen. Fruit gets turned into frozen pie mix, cobbler, etc. It can be lots of work, but we’ve developed a family routine. I.E. yesterday my wife and daughter made 3 different soups and set them up for freezer storage. We also have a nice apple crisp.

Culled non-animal food waste is composted in the backyard.

[Octave]

As Todd linked above, drawstring produce bags are great. It took only a brief conversation with my local produce market for him to let me put everything in those as opposed to the plastic bags that they offer. But the reality is for 9/10 vegetables/fruits you don't need a bag at all. The only things that end up in bags are small items (mushrooms, brussels sprouts, loose beans) and the rest get put directly in my backpack, then I'm back on my bike until I get home and they can go in the produce drawer. The number of plastic bags used to protect peoples' bananas (hint: bananas have their OWN protection) and lettuce (really, are you not going to wash it when you get home anyways) is really disgusting.

On top of that, we keep a constant large bag in the freezer that we put all useable scraps in (onion ends, garlic butts, tomato caviar, leek outers..etc.) and once per week make a batch of broth with it. We reduce the broth to be super-concentrated then pop it into an ice-cube tray. Haven't bought broth in years, use it nearly every day. Aside from reducing waste there are a ton of little nutrients that you lose out on when you toss skins/peels/etc. The same goes for anything that we know will go bad before we'll use it. We had about 10 carrots from our garden sitting in the fridge the last time that we were about to leave town. We threw them into the freezer, and used them in the next batch of broth. Learn to pickle, dry, sand-preserve..etc. and you'll save a fortune and feel better about your waste (or lack thereof).

And never underestimate how many parts of vegetables we have been ignoring all these years. While the butchers and meat consumers are just getting around to remembering that nearly every part of an animal is edible, it seems that the vegetable consumers are a big behind on this. Carrot, beet and radish greens can all be used in soups or for really great pesto. The tops of zucchinis can be roasted and are delicious. There is hardly a vegetable on the planet that actually needs to be skinned... nose-to-tail if you're a meat-eater, root-to-shoot for everything else.

Anything that can't be turned into broth goes into the compost. If you don't have a garden or don't want to compost, talk to your neighbors and find someone who will take it from you.

Here's a nice guide on refrigerator organization that could be helpful also: The Food Lab: How to Organize Your Refrigerator for Better Food Storage | Serious Eats

Learn what your ethylene gas emitters are and how to store them properly to avoid rapid ripening.

[thollandpe]

+1 on composting. My wife grew up composting but her Dad was super selective: nothing cooked or seasoned, zero meat. I think that's because they had a pit, likely anaerobic.

We use an aerobic composter and it devours everything we throw at it, except mussel shells and produce labels. The dirt is obscenely rich, and it's so thick with red wigglers it's scary. Home to the occasional mole family, but they're homebodies.

One downside of our compost is it sprouts the occasional squash where you may not want it. Weeds!

For the fridge I'll use plastic bags from bread or tortillas. Is that cheating?

[fortyfour]

+2 on Composting!

We do not have trash pick up here in our neck of the woods (well you can, but it's a fee based pay to have it picked up). My wife also is a super avid gardener and hence via osmosis I sort of am too now. But one of the first things she had me do when we moved here was build a 3 tier compost bin. Now, growing up in suburban PA north of Philly, my parents did not compost but just out of town, my Grandmother did. It was incredible just how little trash my Grandmom would produce even after a big family gathering

Coming home over the holidays and such, it's striking just how much more waste my parents produce by not composting. (And for all intense purposes they should be.)

Circling back to my first point of no trash pick up: This means that we have to go take all our waste to the recycling center which for us is in Wilton, NH. So I am actively seeing where everything goes and I make the trip maybe once a month or once every other month. We only have 4-5 smallish bags over a 1-2 month period that are incinerated (it's just myself and my wife). Observing my parents who eat a lot of fresh produce, I'd say a lot of the trash they produce is all compostable. Same thing for us. It goes into a stainless pale under the sink and every other night it just goes out into the compost bin and every so often a fresh layer of plant matter is spread on top.

[Octave]

For the fridge I'll use plastic bags from bread or tortillas. Is that cheating?

That's a point worth making - sometimes it's not possible (or at least, obscenely difficult) to avoid 100% of the packaging out there. For us that's where the "reuse" part of the equation comes into play. Right now our fridge is stocked with a lot of homemade hot sauce (all in old 25cl beer bottles with modified lids), homemade confiture (all in old jars), homemade kombucha (in old wine bottles)..etc. you get the idea. Home-mixed spice-blends go into the little ziplocs that come with all the bits/pieces from cable-routing kits (thanks Jagwire)!


One of the things that I have noticed is how culturally embedded certain practices are, or aren't, and how hard those cycles are to break. The above situation, when witnessed by my parents or other US visitors for instance, is usually a mix of pity ("oh, you're too poor to just BUY hot sauce or brand new bottles") and disgust ("how could you re-use old trash to put your food in!??!"). On the other hand, my neighbors here make a fun guessing game of figuring out where each jar/bottle..etc. came from in the first place (Bon Maman are the easy spots) and don't bat an eyelash at our hodge-podge of mugs and plates.

[summilux]

On the Reduce side of things, wife and I decided to eliminate food spoilage as much as we could. We kept a record of unprepared food that went into the compost pile and realized that about a quarter of our fresh food was going bad. Rotten apples, soggy cucumbers and wilted lettuce. So we reduced the volume of food we buy and tried to be creative with over ripe produce. We still have a problem with parsley but things are much better now.

[caleb]

Thanks for all the good suggestions.

We have some of the reusable produce bags, but I'll always surprised how much condensation ends up on the inside of the produce drawers when we use them. I like the idea of reusing bread and tortilla bags.

I'm also struck by how much where I shop makes a difference in the amount of waste. In Minneapolis, I mainly shop at a coop where just about everything is either in bulk or covered in minimal packaging. In New York, I just have a commodity supermarket available, and everything seems to be triple-wrapped in plastic and cardboard. So much of the packaging isn't recyclable, which is really aggravating.

For those of you who are composting in bear country, do you have any strategies for not turning your compost pile into a giant bear bait?

[htwoopup]

The kind of bin we get from the Village is animal resistant (not sure if there is anything animal proof). It is big, plastic (from recycled plastic), and has a top that locks on by screwing it half a turn. I don't have a picture of it as I am not home now, but in looking for one I found some interesting stuff on recycling and re-employing stuff on the MRC's website. It is all in French but you might find it interesting nevertheless. Everything is clickable and goes down to other stuff. Remember this is a place that even recycles styrofoam and everyone brings things to the Good Samaritan place if they can't reuse it.

Train de vie durable - MRC des Laurentides - Gestion des matieres residuelles

In some of the surrounding villages, they collect the compostable stuff in brown bins and have a community compost. In ours they give you your own bin.

Here is the part of the website on composting which has some tips about insects, small animals, etc...

Matieres organiques | MRC des Laurentides - Train de vie durable

[caleb]

We've been working on our waste for a few years, and it's still an ongoing project.

I never realized it was a "thing" though, until today: You’re Addicted to Plastic. Can You Go Cold Turkey? - The New York Times If it's in the Style section of the NYT magazine, it must be on-trend, right? I can certainly think of worse bandwagons to be on.

Anyway, small victory to share. Wednesday night I grabbed our garbage can to haul it out to the curb for pick up. It felt light. I looked inside and it was empty. I went around the house and emptied all the bins to fill a single bag. We aren't plastic free by a long shot, but we're getting better.

[caleb]

I've often wondered how much of our recycling doesn't actually get recycled. Turns out, it might be quite a bit: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling - The New York Times

And if it's true that recycling doesn't work all that well in practice, perhaps it's time we as a society get serious about the reduce and reuse parts of the mantra, especially as the trend toward delivery-everything done with single use packaging takes hold.

[slwrnu]

share your purchases with a neighbour. This way, if you get sidetracked and eg unexpectedly go out for supper when some of your stuff needs to be eaten soon, it can be gratefully consumed rather than thrown away. And your neighbour will return the favour.

[ericpmoss]

Here's another angle on reducing waste in the kitchen, by the world's best chefs.

Bread is Gold – Kitchen Arts & Letters

[ericpmoss]

... and some things I had never thought about -- growing my own stuff, starting with the parts I'd throw out.