Ailish Lalor
One of the simplest ways of reducing your food waste is by planning what you will eat in a week before going grocery shopping. While most people will at least think about what they might need before departing to AH or the Haagse Markt, planning your weekly eating in detail will further help you to reduce food waste, cut costs, and minimise the number of emergency AH To Go visits you need to make. When I plan for the week, I tend to think in terms of breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, and plan something for each of these categories each day.
For me, breakfast tends not to vary a lot, because early morning is not a culinarily creative time for me. I go with oats, soy milk, and fruit in this category, and if I’m running out of my dried toppings, such as seeds or nut butters, I’ll also be sure to replenish those. For the weekend, I usually plan on having something a bit more exciting, like french toast or scrambled tofu.
Lunch and dinner are where most of my planning comes in, because I do very much enjoy cooking when I’m awake. Usually I pick three or four recipes from my cookbooks or online food blogs that I’d like to make throughout the week. I’ll write down all the ingredients needed, and then examine which of them will not be fully used by the recipe. For example, this week I made a butter bean jalfrezi that called for two sticks of celery: but to my infinite disgust, no supermarket sells celery in stick format. Usually, there’ll be several of these ingredients each week. I then create a recipe that will use up all of these ingredients. The aforementioned celery was used up in what I call a ‘Granny Stew’— carrots, potatoes, stock and either beans or seitan. If you prefer not to experiment with recipes and would rather stick to ones you know and love, then feel free to ignore this step.
Planning snacks is still something I struggle with, because for some reason my optimistic planning brain thinks I will be contented with one (1) bar of chocolate a week. My tip here would be to be realistic, and to purchase ingredients for making things like brownies and cakes from scratch. These items are not perishable, usually, so you can have them in your cupboard and not actually use them if you don’t need to.
Next week’s post will detail where to buy different types of food, each in the most sustainable way. Be sure to check it out, and let us know if you have any other tips for reducing food waste!
Act Aware 