Do You Still Have Leftovers From Your Holiday Feast?



Leftover sweet potatoes, beets, and stuffing.

It's December, which means that we have now passed the "safe" time frame to consume any Thanksgiving leftovers you may have in your fridge.  The Mayo Clinic recommends only consuming leftovers within a 4 day time frame after they were initially prepared.  But, if you are like me, you probably still have a few items lingering in the fridge that you just didn't get around to finishing. What you may be amazed to learn is that a quarter to half of all food produced in the United States goes uneaten - not harvested, contaminated during production, spoiled in transit, or thrown out at the grocery store, but an overwhelming amount is actually wasted at home.

Some statistics from a recent New York Times column:

• 40 percent of food waste occurred in the home.
• 93 percent of respondents acknowledged to buying foods they never used.
• Food scraps make up about 19 percent of the waste dumped in landfills
• A family of four that spends $175 a week on groceries squanders more than $2,275 a year

So it seems that once again we have run into the fact that being wasteful is not only harming the environment, but also bad for our financial situation - all the more reason in this economic climate to assess how much food you waste and where you can be more thrifty with your food budget!

With all this knowledge, someone is capitalizing on this epidemic and has created what seems to be a very useful app for iphone to help you build a shopping list and remind you of expiration dates.  Author and blogger Jonathan Bloom has also just released a book that I will be adding to my reading list American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food 

So what should you do?

1. Plan your meals before you go grocery shopping, you will be more likely to buy only what you need and avoid those "impulse" purchases of items you don't really need.
2. Eat perishables soon after purchasing. Besides the concern of food-borne illness food is much more nutritious when it is fresh.  Then, pack those leftovers for lunch the next day.
3. Soup, soup, and more soup - I can walk into any house and pull things out of the fridge and cupboard that probably need to be eaten and make a delicious soup, just ask my wife!
4. Compost any leftovers or fresh food that has passed its safe time frame to consume.

Finally, I recently had the opportunity to meet with the Education Coordinator for Cedar Grove Composting, and learned a few new things about industrial composting, mostly what you can and cannot deposit in your curbside yard waste bin.  Click here to view acceptable items on the Cedar Grove website - most notably I learned that very few paper cups are compostable as most now have a plastic rather than wax coating, wine corks can also not be composted but instead recycled at many local wineries*!

So, here's a cheers to your holiday meals and if you don't finish your leftovers, make sure to compost!

*I have calls in to a few local wineries and will post a list of where to recycle.