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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
I found that visitng shop frequently and buying a little each time helps with this. Also, knowing what you have and planning what to cook with stock in mind. Also, one might find better to buy at small grocery stores (turkish in my area). These have ability to buy as an example 10 or less potatoes instead of fixed 2.5kg of potatoes. That way you're not bound to swiftly eat potatoes before they rot.
I buy stuff that lasts. For bread, I find that rye takes weeks longer than white or wheat to start going bad, and bagels last ages too. I make smoothies with mostly frozen fruit. For dinner stuff, if I'm not feeling like cooking I either buy things I'm going to eat in the next few days or I get these sealed precooked things from Aldi that are great and keep well. Coconut milk also tends to keep better than cow milk and lately I've realized I greatly prefer it.
About the only things that are super perishable that I keep around are bananas and avocados, and I just tend to eat these a lot. I also keep spinach or kale around for my smoothies, but I rebag them into separate smaller bags as soon as I get them. If my bananas are getting overripe, they get frozen for smoothies.
I also tend to buy canned soups, which last ages.
When I was cooking regularly I'd make a lot of chilis and pasta sauces. They're good to freeze and they keep well on their own. Chili is arguably better after freezing and having more time to develop.
You can definitely eat pretty healthy and keep plenty of food in the house without constantly chasing waste.
Use a software/app to meal plane. (Mealie/Tandoor) You pick the recipes you fancy for the days/week/whatever period. It generates a grocery list containing exactly what is needed for the meals you chose, nothing else.
I haven't thrown away anything in a couple years now. Oh and freeze leftovers if needed.
Yeah ...
Strategies against this include cooking for several people (well, that ain't happening), doing meal prep several days in advance / cooking larger portions that you can eat over a couple of days, and buying frozen ingredients (still better than buying entire frozen meals). Some non-frozen ingredients keep for a long time, too, e.g. dried rice or noodles, onions, pickled vegetables.
Something that worked for me is always shopping for a specific meal. Instead of buying ground beef because I might want burgers or tacos or chili, I instead buy everything for a chili. It’s lead to less “oh I forgot I had this beef in here” and more “I better use this nice, fresh beef to make chili because otherwise I’ll go hungry.
It’s not a perfect system, and seems really obvious in hindsight, but has been a paradigm shift for me.
with pen and paper
I had this issue with produce. I stopped buying it because it would just go bad before I used it.
Be organized, have a weekly menu. I'm sorry this is the solution. My bad.
i dont, my family always buys too much food regardkess to how many times i tell them to not
I got a chest freezer for $200. I freeze everything before or on its expiration date.
Sometimes if its mushy veggies I make a stock and freeze it for the next meal. If its too far gone i have a compost jar in the kitchen and a bin outside.
I started a garden and an edible native hedge this year. I have tea herbs and squash for free now and working on a seed propagation.
I started a coop mushroom grow with my neighbors since he felled some hardwood and I had the plan. The leftover mushrooms we dont eat will be either sold at market or made into liquid cultures.
Were talking about going in on a local half cow or pig. He says if my garden keeps growing we can buy the plot behind us together and start a farm. Would cut grocery costs a lot.
My wife and I have pantry weeks where we dont go grocery shopping, we eat whats in reserve, soak dry beans, thaw last weeks on sale chicken breast and pressure Cook em, make a flatbread and have some curry.
Instant pot helps too. Thinking about getting coturnix quail to feed good scraps to and get eggs out of. I can plant cover crops for em on the last strip of lawn I have.
It doesn't have to be wasteful forever.
Please don't waste food.
fun fact: we grow enough food to feed 15B people. It's just that we feed it to the animals, then eat the animals.
We also throw away approximately half the perfectly good food we produce in the U.S.
Most of the food we grow for animals is not edible by humans.
Also the soil we use for growing that food is not suitable for growing human food, permanently or temporary.
One of the basics of agriculture is crop rotation. And this crop rotation usually need for foods that are good for animals but not so good for humans.
That while talking about food that is grown specifically for animals. A good part of animal food is just residues from human food. For instance, in my grandmother's house I remember the chickens were basically a walking bio-disposal bin, at not point food was grown specifically for those chicken.
In the matter of wasted food, resources. A lot of it have to do with transportation from very far away places.
This is weapons grade copium.
The main ingredients in almost all animal feed for industrial farming (90+% of meat production) is grain/cereals. Like corn, wheat, oat, etc. humans eat those things. The protein sources for animal feed is usually soy… humans eat soy.
Please explain why “the soil we use for growing animal feed is not suitable for growing human food”
The only factual part of your comment is about your grandmas chickens eating food scraps. But I’ll bet you they didn’t live entirely on scraps. They still get grain to survive. Also, as stated before, 90%+ of meat doesn’t come from sustainable grandma’s chickens. It comes from hell on earth factory farms.
Do you know what "alfalfa" is?
I don't know if that's the correct english translation.
Widely used as a source of animal food. Good luck trying to eat that.
Search which cultives tend to be part of healthy crop rotations and most of the times you'll find a crop that's used for animals and cannot be eaten by humans.
Also not are grains and soy are created equal or are as suitable for human consumption in a healthy diet as other plants. Or almost most planta that are used for animal consumption. There's two fact here, first that many times there's a mixed use (part of the plant goes to the animal and part of the plant goes to the human) and other times even when everything is for the animal, there tend to be different varieties. The corn dedicated to human consumption is not the same corn dedicated to animal consumption. It grows different and can take different amount of nutrients for the soil, or take different economic requirements. Human food tend to be much more expensive overall, because our stomach cannot digest plants as easily as herbivores.
Do you think human beings have been farming animals and those "extra crops" just for funsies. It's the most efficient way to feed human population. That's why it have been done for millenia.
Yeah, alfalfa is the correct translation. I tried to do a quick search for how much land is used for forage crops (like alfalfa and hay) but didn’t come up with any decent stats. However, I looked for the global crop production stats and the top 4 globally are sugarcane, corn, rice, and wheat. These 4 contribute almost 50% of total arable land use. On the graphics for production— forage crops don’t even get an honorable mention. So unless you have some info on how much wasted land alfalfa grows on, I’m going to say it’s not all that important (land use wise)
Second, using different cultivars for animal feed and direct human consumption is true. We don’t eat dent corn. We eat sweet corn. Two very different varieties. However, saying that one variety can be grown on this patch of land and the other varieties cannot is simply false. Yes there are differences in adaptability of different varieties, but they aren’t massive. Especially when you read about how much fertilizer and water we dump on our animal feed crops each year. Any damn plant could grow with those kind of inputs.
And lastly, your “appeal to tradition” argument is a classic logical fallacy. So I won’t try to refute it.
There's a economical difference. Growing plants for animals is cheaper. Plants for animals are easier to take care. We dump a lot of fertilizer on animal crops. But we dump even more in human crops.
They amount of care and soil usage is always going to be higher on crops destined to human consumption.
This could grow if we tried to grow only human based food? Yes, but with much higher economical effort andes yield per sqrmeter. When nutrients grow thin in soil is not only that things straight up do not grow, is that less things grow and they grow smaller.
It's not tradicional. It's observation of history. Humans have not grown as omnivore because of tradition. We have not domesticated animals because of tradition. We have done it because it's the most efficient way to do things.
You for instance are vegan because of tradition. Not because economics or efficiency dictate it, but because a series of moral considerations that were passed onto you thus modifying your behavior. But most humans population if faced with the nutritional challenge will both grow plants and farm animals because it is the most efficient way to do things.
Traditional exceptions would be the opposite. Like the cultures that forbid certain foods because religious reasons.
Gonna need a source for that claim on higher inputs for human food.
If economics is your excuse for raising animal feed instead of human food then it’s just another knock on capitalism. (Although if you calculated the economic cost of raising/slaughtering/shipping all that meat, I’d wager it’s not cheaper than growing plants for humans to eat)
Also, we farmed animals in the past because they are a good storage for calories when it’s winter and you can’t grow food. We live in a global society now. It’s not necessary. Animals are grown and killed because their meat is pleasurable to eat; simple as that.
Hard to find a source for fertilizer usage per type of crop so of you want to dismiss that for lack of source I'm ok with that. Still think that a crop with higher sugar content and a more precise composition would need more input. But if you can provide a source otherwise would also be welcome to clear doubts.
When I'm talking about economy I'm not talking wall street. I'm talking about the definition of economy. Which is the distribution of resources.
I don't agree in your final statement. For many reasons: It's not a good thing being global, it is not desirable that your food comes from the other side of the world just because you decided not to eat a local chicken. That's quite complex and a different conversation overall but I think local food consumption is better overall. And without putting restrictions as in "do not eat meat" it's easier to achieve local consumption.
While winter storage is important, plant based food can also be stored, and we see animal consumption in human cultures from places without cold winters so the statements can be labeled as not true, or at least not sufficient.
Most people eat meat because it's the easiest way to have the necessary caloric and nutrient input. Not for pleasure. If we would only eat for pleasure we would only probably eat sugar which is plant based. Vegan diet is just too much of a headache within a population that already have issues maintaining balance with an omnivore diet. Many pleasure foods are plant based, like pizza, so that must no be the only reason people eat meat.
But do we really want 15B people?
it's probably gonna happen eventually. We really can't sustain too many more people on an animal based diet :/
A freezer and a pantry full of canned and dried foods.
Only buy fresh meats and veggies when you are actually gonna cook.
Freeze leftovers in single portion sizes.
Eventually you’ll have a bunch of homemade frozen dinners to choose from.
My problem isn't that I don't use what I buy, the problem is that I buy too much. Like the recipe I need calls for one stalk of celery, but I can only buy an entire celery plant, like 11 stalks in a bundle because that's all the store offers. What do I do with the remaining 10 stalks?
Keep them in the fridge. Find other recipes that use celery. It’s quite versatile and keeps for quite a long time in the fridge! A lot of French recipes call for mirepoix (celery, carrots, onions; all diced) and Italian dishes call for soffritto which is the same thing. A ton of soups and pastas use mirepoix/soffritto as a base.
Now get out there and cook some celery, carrots, and onions!
I'll only buy something perishable when I need it. I tend to cook for 3-4 days in one go in order to make cooking for only myself somewhat economical. I tend to visit the supermarket every other day so I don't really have to plan too much.
In my household we tend to buy just enough that we know we can eat it over the course of two to three days if it is perishable foods.
If the store sells smaller packs of meat and vegetables and other perishable foods, we buy those and use them in our cooking the next few days.
We don't have a lot of freezer space and we don't have a garden, so we try and avoid bulk buying unless we know we will be able to eat it all before it goes bad. It works pretty well.
Clean-up is what stops many people. Get a good titanium no-stick pan - I like "Our Place" pans. Get individual portion meats or frozen meats or buy bulk and freeze in portions. Do the same with vegetables. Heat your seasoned pan up then put some oil in just before you put meat in. Cook meat until almost done, then add vegetables to same pan - heat them up. Serve. Let pan cool while you eat. Refrigerate left-overs. Rinse and wipe pan down. Wash dish. DONE.