Waste of Food

I was so annoyed at myself one day last week. I had left some chicken to thaw on the counter for that night’s dinner and forgot to put it in the fridge before I left for work to continue thawing. When I got home, it was too warm to eat and I didn’t want to risk salmonella. So into the trash it went.

It was the principle more than the inconvenience that got to me: I can’t stand wasting food. I am very thorough with leftovers. If there’s any way I can salvage some food for a future meal, I will freeze it for later. The freezer is one of man’s greatest inventions and ours is full of dinners for the week. My solution to everything I’m not going to eat right away is to freeze it. I don’t always feel like defrosting something and at times I would prefer something fresher but not every random Wednesday night needs to be a gourmet meal. Sometimes you just need something quick after a long workday.

Despite last week’s mixup, my food waste is pretty close to zero. This comes from a combination of being cheap, gluttonous and believing that wasting food is just terrible when people go hungry. I could stand to eat less but what I cook, I eat. I will never scrape uneaten food off my plate into the trash. I’ll cook a whole chicken and end up with several dinners and lunches plus stock so it’s convenient for when you don’t have a lot of time. Generally the only food I throw away is what has expired and even then, unless it’s milk, I’ll walk on the edge of expiration dates, since you can usually eat something unless it smells.

I would have won the Great Depression. I would have been one of those people saving scraps for soup and turning stale bread into croutons.