Rising food costs, ever-increasing inflation, proposed governmental tariffs on imports, shortages, and a raging epidemic of H5N1 bird flu have sent people scrambling to find ways to stretch their grocery dollars. This has renewed the public’s interest in easy ways to bring down the cost of their everyday grocery bills and how to make what they buy last longer. They hope to navigate the current financial crisis and still be able to feed the people they love without breaking the bank.
Food Waste
From dry goods and pantry staples to fresh meat, vegetables, and fruits, home cooks can employ many simple and quick techniques to help prevent ingredients from spoiling. Time-tested tips and tricks for everything from food preservation and standard care to reusing and revitalization methods allow consumers to make full use of their purchases and get more bang for their buck. Yet, over 92 billion dollars in food goes to waste in the United States yearly. Consumers lose just over two pounds of food a week per household, totaling nearly 32% of their grocery cart, and lose around $900 annually to food waste. All the while, the commercial food industry wastes more than 51% of all food produced.
Changing Habits
First and foremost, one of the more obvious ways to reduce food waste is to hash out a weekly meal plan for the household. While such a strategy seems an absolute must, many consumers often shop on a whim, without a list or plan. This practice is one of the major reasons behind a family’s initial food waste, as shoppers will buy various items for a set of recipes and not factor in how much of their fresh ingredients will be left over.
Keeping a food inventory, monitoring sell-by and expiration dates, and learning to wing it when it comes to typical meals can greatly counteract the inherent loss in such habits. Utilizing flexible recipes, like soups, stews, stir-fries, and salads, regularly helps mitigate the loss of leftover fresh ingredients and allows home cooks to add even more variety into their diets with less waste.
Preparation
Proper preparation and preservation techniques additionally increase the longevity of fresh meat, vegetables, and fruits. Pre-cutting whole vegetables, pre-portioning ingredients, desiccating fruits with sugar, salt-curing meats, freezing excess or leftover scraps, and even dehydrating peels and stale bread are just some of the many ways to save even more money on groceries. It takes little to no time to implement once consumers learn the basics of easy food preservation.
Vegetable Hacks
Typically, freezing is the best time-saving technique to stop fresh vegetables from spoiling. Pre-chop low-water content vegetables, like carrots, corn, peas, and broccoli, to your desired size to help, and then freeze for easy meal planning. For some vegetables, blanching is recommended to preserve their color, while others, like onions, leeks, peppers, and tomatoes, are not, so it is advantageous for home cooks to keep a chart handy when pre-prepping vegetables.
Understanding how water affects fresh produce is essential to reducing spoilage and staving mold growth and natural decomposition. Water is the enemy of longevity for most fresh foods, so keeping vegetables whole and dry is a must to make them last longer. Storing your vegetables in paper rather than plastic bags, removing them from their clamshell packaging, and storing them in airtight containers will also increase their life span.
Vegetables like celery, green onions, kale, beet greens, lettuce, and chard are the opposite. Sitting said vegetables in a glass of water can decrease instances of wilting. Even wilted celery will perk back up after a good drink, and green onions will continue to grow indefinitely if there is sunlight. Many fresh herbs, like basil, cilantro, and parsley, can also be stored via this method to help combat how quickly they spoil in the refrigerator.
Fruits
Of all the fresh fruits available for purchase, berries are the one category of edibles that spoil the fastest. Depending on how long they have been sitting on the supermarket shelves, they can become moldy and inedible in a few short days and quickly become a loss if not eaten. To combat this, the easiest way to increase longevity is to immediately sort, wash, dry, and store them in airtight containers. Mixing berries with sugar is the best option, as it draws out the juice and creates a preserving syrup.
Typically, whole citrus fruits, like lemons, oranges, and grapefruits, can be stored in the refrigerator, as most tropical fruits thrive in climate-controlled and cold environments. However, this may not be necessary if the home’s typical environmental temperature is well-regulated. Citrus and other fruits like apples, peaches, pears, grapes, and melons can thrive happily sitting on the kitchen counter for quite a while. So long as they are kept dry and inspected regularly.
Meat
Freezing meat is the standard technique when preserving meat, but many consumers often toss the package of meat in the freezer instead of properly packing it away. This technique is fine for the short term, however, for long-term freezer storage it is recommended to pre-prep the meat. Breaking down larger packages into typical portions for each meal, removing and repacking from their original packages, and vacuum sealing them protect the meat from freezer burn and oxidization.
Salt curing and air-drying cuts before packaging for the freezer can extend their freezer time further by removing some of its moisture and deterring any potential bacterial growth. For packages of meat that have seen better days, after potentially months in the freezer, and may not seem fresh enough for dinner, home cooks should keep in mind that it can still be utilized. These pieces can easily be dehydrated and turned into jerky or bouillon powder.
Final Thoughts
While many of these techniques, hacks, tips, and tricks can seem time-consuming, they don’t need to be. For the best outcomes, families that incorporate more of these cost-saving food habits will regularly find themselves getting used to the routine -slowly but surely. Families should, however, take their time and add new techniques step by step. There is no need to implement everything all at once.
