Normal Green: The Food Waste Reduction Challenge

I was on Twitter last night, and an intriguiging tweet from OrganicMania hit my Twitter stream. It read (in 140 characters or less), "Food Waste Reduction Challenge kick-off: No, this kick-off has nothing to do with the Superfluous Bowl..." and included a link to Crunchy Chicken's.

Starting yesterday (Feb. 1), Crunchy Chicken is asking everyone to take the Food Waste Reduction Challenge. Did you know that half of the garbage piling up in our landfills isn't disposable diapers or glass or plastic, it's edible food? And, shockingly, "40 to 50 percent of U.S. edible food never gets eaten. That's $100 billion worth of edible food discarded every year in the U.S. It's a tremendous waste of resources and one that we are all guilty in contributing to."

Not only that, edible food discarded in landfills leads to methane off-gassing which — you got it — contributes to global warming. So save those over-ripe bananas that you've been tossing into the trash for banana bread. You can easily freeze them right in their peels and save them for a day you feel like baking.

The challenge is simple — reduce the amount of edible food you throw out or compost. Here's how:

Your job is to keep track of the food that you have on hand and make sure that it gets eaten or preserved before it goes bad and needs to be disposed. All it takes is a little planning, some organization and the willingness to be creative. Just remember to cook wisely and shop wisely.

So, every week, go through your fridge, cabinets and cellar storage and see what's getting close to its pull date or is starting to turn. If it's getting near, plan on eating it, making it into a meal, preserving it or freezing it. Since this is an important challenge that will help you reduce your waste and save money I'm going to host it for the whole month of February.

One of the ways that I ensure we don't waste money or energy on food going bad is meal planning. Every Sunday I sit down and plan out the week's meals, then buy only what I need. We rarely throw rotten food away and I have a metric ton of veggie scraps and Parmesan cheese rinds in my freezer that I use for making stock once a month.

If you'd like to participate, hop on over to Crunchy Chicken for more details, and pick yourself up a nice badge for your blog or website as well.