Food Waste Challenge Week 1

I’ve done many things trying to keep our grocery bill fairly low. I shop sales, go to Sam’s club, buy generic brands, occasionally use coupons, but there’s one area that I really feel is my weakness when it comes to our groceries, and that’s the food we never eat.

I think it’s easy to not realize how much money is wasted when we toss food out. When you use coupons the receipt tells you how much you saved. When you use a price book you can know what the lowest prices are, but there’s no calculator on the trash can that says, “You just wasted 50 cents worth of uneaten apple” or, “A total of $10 worth of food was thrown out this week.”

The Frugal Girl got tired of seeing how much  she wasted, so she started Food Waste Friday, where she shares pictures of all the food she threw out that week. The purpose was to hold her accountable and hopefully humiliate her enough to try harder at not wasting food. I’ve occasionally linked up on Food Waste Fridays and shared my food waste too. But to be completely honest, when I have a whole bunch of wasted food, it’s easy to skip sharing it that week, thinking maybe next week I’ll have less, so it won’t be so embarrassing.

• So here’s what I’m going to do. For the next 3 weeks ( I was going to make it a full month, but with Christmas and us possibly travelling I decided on just 3 weeks for now) I want to participate in the Frugal Girl’s food waste Friday…even if I have a whole fridge of food for the trash, but I’m really hopping the humility of it all will make me be a little more serious about eating it all up.
• I also want to share not only what I waste, but also how I didn’t waste! Thought I’d throw some happiness in with the bad!
• I saw on another blog that was linked to The Frugal Girl that she not only posted what she wasted, but also calculated about how much that wasted food cost. I want to estimate how much money was spent on the food I waste. Because I hate wasted money, I think this will really help motivate me and help me see how much lower our grocery bill could be if I didn’t waste food.

Leftover night a few weeks ago

So to start off my “Waste Less Food Journey” I’ll tell you what I wasted this week:

• Some chicken pasta salad.
• Some dip.
• I really feel like there was something else I tossed this week, but can’t for the life of me remember what it was.

How I did NOT waste:

• Last week I made a big batch of lentil barley stew. I knew I wasn’t going to get around to eating the leftovers right away, so I froze it instead.
• We had a leftovers night on Monday and ate a lot of our Thanksgiving leftovers.
• I’ve been eating lots of turkey sandwiches for lunches, which I love!

Total cost of wasted leftovers (very much estimated, just trying to give myself an idea): Under $2

So why am I sharing this with you?

1. Writing it out helps me put my thoughts together on it.
2. Posting it on my blog helps me be more likely to stick with it as you are my accountability partners.
3. Just in case any of you have the same problem as me and want to join me in this journey, I could use the moral support.

This post is shared at The Frugal Girl for Food Waste Friday.