Crunchy's Food Waste Reduction Challenge

I took Crunchy Chicken's Food Waste Reduction Challenge, but have yet to check in, so here goes...

My name is Kellie, and I waste food. I never realized how MUCH food until I started this challenge.

Yesterday I threw away a whole cucumber...at least I think it was a cucumber. It sat in the fridge for a long time before I finally gave it a proper burial in my compost heap.

Mr. Greenhab threw away a bag of green fuzzy hamburger buns.

Little Greenhab, well, he's probably the worst offender as he throws away about half of every meal. Which probably means that *I* should be doing something different, like giving him less food to begin with. But as you probably know, kids tend to love a food one day and refuse to eat it the next. Or grumble about how hungry they are, then only eat 2 bites of dinner.

Anyway...

The stats that Crunchy provides on her blog were surprising to me:

• 50% of the garbage that goes into the landfill is edible food.
• 40 to 50% of U.S. edible food never gets eaten. That's $100 billion worth of edible food discarded every year in the US.
• Food waste is the largest landfill contributor to methane gas production.

I never would have guessed that half of our landfill garbage is food - and edible food at that. Although we do waste more food than we should, we are able to compost it, so that it's at least not adding to the landfill. Still, there's reason to waste it in the first place.

So I've started keeping closer tabs on what's in the fridge. Making sure nothing gets pushed to the back, or put behind the pickles, and left to morph into something unrecognizable. I'm trying to be a little more creative and throw things together that I normally wouldn't.

I'm also attempting to use everything to it's fullest. We get those roasted chickens from Costco every so often and usually eat the whole thing. Last week I went one step further and used the bones and some onion to make homemade chicken stock. It's the first time I've ever tried anything like that and it left me feeling so domestic!

Part of Crunchy's challenge is to weigh or photograph your week's waste and post it to your blog each Sunday. I'm going to try my best to keep up with that.