Much fridge food ‘goes there to die’
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- Develop a notion of cadence: how much food could you get through in a given interval (3-7 days), and how will this be affected by visitors, eating out, and travel. This might seem obvious but it's not — a lot of people have a "stocking up" mentality — if I buy a lot now, I won't need to go to the store for a while--that leads to suboptimal nutrition, more trips to the store, or eating out more b/c the fridge is empty. Using a standardized interval makes it much easier to learn adjustments.
- Develop an inventory of "endgame" meals that are less perishable that you can always have on hand so you can maintain your cadence. Examples: Halloumi (grilling cheese, good for months), tacos (canned beans; refrigerated tortillas, cheese, peppers and onions are good for weeks), pasta (olive oil and parmesean). Things like charcuterie, esp smoked and jarred meats, and fermented foods were originally invented by peasants to last for a long time and they still have their use, whether you are peasant or not. By contrast, there are "opening" meals like fresh seafood, which really should be eaten on the same day as the trip to the grocery store.
- Have so many food-safe containers on hand that any leftovers get stored without a second thought. Then your endgame meals get pushed back.
Developing a habit of going to the store (even if you don't feel like it) and getting some of those less-perishable items so you have endgame options is key.
One thing I've found helps is to get really comfortable cooking. First I plan a bit getting a recipe (this is best done @work or on the way back. I stop over at a store. Finally, at home, I pour a small glass of wine/open a beer, turn on music or a podcast (or netflix) and walk through my recipe.
This clearly takes time investment, so it's important to go through the habit so you can 1) be comfortable with it and 2) optimize it for you. Rewarding myself with desirable activities as part of the meal-prep is great. Taking pix and sharing what I made is also fun (even if it's bad - can be a good laugh).
Harold McGee replies: Good point to bring up! Bread and other lean baked goods are the exception to the rule that cold storage is good. Bread stales faster at refrigerator temperatures than at room temperature. So if you want to keep a loaf for a couple of days, a breadbox is better than the fridge. For much longer than that, the freezer is the best place.
https://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/harold-mc...
It's mainly used to cut sashimi slices from a fillet without thawing the fish first. It goes in the fridge with bite-sized nigiri-sushi rice wads, and is defrosted by lunch time the next day.
It occasionally gets used to make really thin slices out of slightly stale bread.
But more to the point, good quality bread has been more ingrained in the culture of several (but not all) European countries than in the US, and while the wheels are turning, it seems to take some time.
But also bear in mind that in some places, eg rural France, it might well be a ten minute drive to the baker in the next village. People will still do it daily, or several times a week.
Also the case in the middle east and Asia, though it tends to be flat breads of various kinds. And in some places like India it's more common to just make it yourself.
Another is that you consume significantly less than even a small loaf of bread. I haven't been to a bakery that will sell you individual slices of bread, or even parts of a loaf. Maybe this is different in other countries (I live in the US).
It's also typically much more expensive to buy serving-sized anything.
But frozen bread is not quite same. It has a strange crispiness to it.
> INGREDIENTS: Organic whole wheat (organic whole wheat flour, organic cracked wheat), water, organic dried cane syrup (sugar), organic expeller pressed canola oil, organic wheat gluten, organic molasses, organic cultured whole wheat, sea salt, yeast, organic vinegar.
Is it the vinegar?
Where I live, it's more like 20% relative humidity, and bread with air exchange dries out.
About your situation: I've to admit that I don't know about keeping bread well in such bad conditions. I'd try a slightly more sealed container, or if that doesn't work, slice and freeze it fresh. Other than that, find uses for dry bread (works perfectly fine in soup, or if white bread, make breadcrumbs etc. etc.).
20% rel. humidity is so low that it is very uncomfortable for humans, even unhealthy for some people. Are you really sure that's your in-house humidity? Outside/inside are often very different, due washed clothes drying, cooking, plants, respiration, and also humidity from the cellars in some buildings.
If yes, and if possible, I'd recommend an air humidifier to get that up to 40% or so. Depending on volume, a $60 unit should be able to do this, even if it will take three weeks until the humidity slowly approaches sensible levels.
If you aren't in a hurry, it also thaws pretty well on the counter. About 10 minutes seems to do the trick.
I wish someone had told me all this a long time ago. For the first 35+ years of my adult life buying bread either meant wasting a lot, or eating a lot more sandwiches and toast than I would have liked.
The other frozen thing I wish I'd known about a lot earlier is microwave "steam in bag" frozen vegetables, such as [1]. They are only $0.78 at my local store, which is way cheaper than the canned vegetables I used to buy, taste way better, and are trivial to prepare (stick bag in microwave for 5 minutes, let stand for 1 minute).
[1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Steamable-Mixed-Veget...
As a french person, the idea that you would put bread in the fridge just horrifies me. But then most of the stuff labelled as bread in the US really isn't bread.
A bread machine will make both your bread a million times better, both taste and ingredients-that-are-inside wise.
And the imitation "sandwich" bread that tastes like cardboard and sawdust easily lasts for 3+ weeks regardless of where and how it is stored. Which makes me marvel at what it's made of that it doesn't go bad in a month.
Bread machines are tricky and very messy. They don't produce enough heat to fully cook bread through like it would in a proper commercial oven. At least that was my experience with all the consumer-grade bread machines. YMMV
Here's one BBC article that mentions it: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4DfZMpv7BYJ3kGXdHx...
"Freezing turns starch into resistant starch... this means that your body gets far fewer calories from the bread. In effect, the resistant starch feeds your gut bacteria, rather than feeding you."
In my analysis, one of the best ways to reduce waste and over-consumption is to stop subsidies for agriculture, water, oil etc, and let prices reflect the real cost. Of course, in a growth-based economy this kind of change would never happen.
But other solutions are also possible, even in the current system. Our family of four is slowly transitioning to sustainable consumption, starting from food and hopefully becoming fully autonomous someday with regards to water and electricity.
One of the changes we've made is buying higher-quality products in smaller quantities, preferably from local sources. Another change is to try and close the waste loop. Any food not eaten by us will go to our dog and cat, and eventually to our chickens, who provide eggs, meat and soil fertiliser. Further optimisation is achieved by using dry toilets - our bodily waste is composted on site, the carbon is sequestered and eventually turns into soil.
I strongly believe that "closing the loop" like that can be practiced on a much larger scale, even on a national scale.
Secondly to incentivize less consumption.
I disagree, saying that there are other better models than the completely free market, that still employ free market elements, including tiered and time of use pricing. But that's probably because we believe in different societal objectives on this subject.
We want everyone to be able to afford enough gas to get around, but if we price it cheaply enough to do that, large consumers are going to use too much and damage the environment.
If we place larger taxes on the fuel to price in the externality of environmental damage, we price poorer people out of the market for gas.
No such incentive structure exists for the gasoline market, and absent a true carbon tax, the remaining way to achieve conservation of gasoline is to push forward alternatives to gasoline powered vehicles.
This wouldn't help as much as you think. Even without subsidies, those things would still be very cheap, and the subsidies are ultimately paid by all of us anyway in taxes.
Ending agricultural subsidies sounds nice in theory, but what other consequences will it have? I sure wouldn't want to have to tell the low-income part of town "Your food is now twice as expensive, but if you just plan better and don't throw as much away it'll work out the same." Poor people can't afford tupperware! Lack of planning isn't their problem. Being poor is expensive.
edit: App I use is eMeals, I tried several and this is my favorite so far, we are on the Paleo plan right now but they have maybe 8 or 10 different plans and you can switch pretty much at will. If anyone else has one they love please let me know!
And you get that already for the cheap units.
So, it's a freezer, it freezes, and it doesn't send a post to Facebook. The only complaint I would have is their loudness. Modern extra-slow compressors are often (perceived) louder than previous-gen units.
Also: given that even DIY ovens usually start with "get a cheap PID controller from e-bay", I doubt that commercial ones use anything else.
That said, very few refrigerators out of the large number of available models (many more than say dishwashers or clothes washer/dryers) have the same interior layout.
Even two nearby models from the same manufacturer with minor feature differences will have significantly different layouts, to the point that you can't just choose to get a fridge with or without feature X without also choosing between differences in the likely more important aspect of layout.
- Every time you pull out the bin, you get a reminder about what you have, and what is going bad
- A meal is fairly easily structured by drawing one or more times from each bin
- It's much easier to clean a bin than to clean the whole fridge; you can move the contents into a new bin and clean the old one
- Food stays fresher because it's in airtight containers, and not subject to the horrid dry air of the fridge
- I know roughly how many person-days of food are in a bin —— so I can plan when to go to the store
- It's really easy to know what kind of food to buy more of when you go to the store —— bin closest to empty.
The one gotcha is that some bins can't be out of the fridge for long (e.g. meat), but generally the bins have sufficient thermal mass that 3-5 minutes on the counter inspection and choosing a few ingredients isn't going to cause any spoilage.
or perhaps a software solution can help. Your fridge could recommend you eat certain things which are about to go mouldy.
I learned this when I was about to hack together a chest fridge with a PID controler and the appliance repair shop where I went to get parts gave me the XY problem question. Once I told them what I was doing they just did the thermostat replacement instead in no time.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!
If I were one to build appliances, I would probably start by pumping liquid refrigerant through thermally-conductive shelves, and dispense entirely with blowing the cold air around. Air has almost no thermal mass. Water with a bit of ammonia dissolved in it is probably what is circulating through aluminum tubes.
Put the food to be chilled directly on the cold shelf, and the heat is removed by conduction, rather than convection.
Once we have that squared away, separate the portion of the appliance responsible for removing the heat from the portion responsible for storing the food. Stop selling the ugly awkward insulated cabinet attached the refrigerator. Now you have your standard back end, which does nothing but circulate fluid at a specific temperature through external hoses, and a customizable variety of front ends with standardized refrigeration hose fittings.
I'd want my insulated food storage cabinets to have evacuated double-paned glass windows in them, proximity-activated fluorescent tube lights, be relatively shallow for fridge shelves, and have pegboards on the back wall. I hate having to move front-food around to get to the back-food. It should all be front-food, which means shelves that are wide and not deep. One cannot do this with a monolithic appliance. One can easily do this with modular parts.
The deepest foods I ever want to store are large pizza boxes. Even those don't fill up the entire depth of a typical fridge.
The health benefits of a diet high in fruits and vegetables are just enormous. I'd much rather over-buy than under-buy. If someone in the household ends up eating junk food because there was no fruit/veggie option, that's a disastrous failure condition. The solution is to make sure that we never run out of fruits and vegetables, which necessarily entails keeping excess inventory that will eventually be thrown out.
Is this financially wasteful? In a very narrow sense, sure. Yet even in just economic terms the health benefits from a diet high in fruits and vegetables overwhelms any grocery bill considerations. At the end of the day produce is much cheaper than insulin.
It's pretty hard to freeze leafy greens for a nice salad though...
Like you alluded to the biggest challenge is the taste factor. Eating veggies over junk food is already enough of an uphill battle willpower wise. Especially with kids in the house. Combined with the inconvenience of dethawing, they're just not that popular.
I wish American super-markets would stock a wider range of fermented vegetables. In terms of long-term preservation, I find fermentation to be more appealing than freezing for most cases. Frozen veggies typically just taste like a flatter version of their fresh counterparts. Whereas fermented veggies have a unique taste that's appealing all on its own.
You're keeping track of potentially 100+ items, all need storing differently, all go off at different speeds, and you need to predict when you'll need more. You're basically running a shop in your head.
Seen in that light, just as it's not advisable to try and run a business in your head, it shouldn't be advisable to try and run your kitchen the same way.
How do you think the Hawaiian pizza was invented?
Edit: More seriously, a meal plan can help. Check the fridge to see what needs using, write a meal plan based on that, write a shopping list based on the plan. Not onerous when you get used to it.
Buy only from that list.
The only thing that really throws us off is if we end up eating out with friends once or twice and then our "snacking" food runs out faster than our "meal" food. Usually we base our grocery trips on when we run out of milk though, which happens pretty predictably.
I always heard it was the inner city people and the rural people that didn't have grocery stores easy to get to.
We're 30-45 minutes away from the nearest store, let alone grocery store or supermarket. We make 1 trip every 2 weeks to stock up on groceries, and often plan the entire month in advance. We grow and can our own vegetables, because fresh vegetables are too far away and don't store as well long-term.
The push for meal planning, I'm now realizing, is weird to me because we've always done that. That it is a function of the physical space I occupy has never occurred to me.
In 2010, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that 23.5 million Americans live in "food deserts", meaning that they live more than... 10 miles from a supermarket in rural areas.
I always figured it applied more to super-poor city dwellers.
10 miles in a rural area is nothing. Like, I'm 10 miles from the nearest town right now, and that feels pretty close.
But to me - because food deserts have a larger impact on low-income folks, I think about it in their context. If I didn't have access to a reliable form of transportation, 10 miles would be a super long way to have to travel.
I could be 200km from the nearest grocery store, and it'd just mean I need to stockpile a bit more, because as you say, assuming there are roads etc, I can jump in the car whenever and go there.
By contrast someone who's poor and severely disabled might feel they're in a 'desert' if the nearest store is 200m away and they can't walk.
If you lived in one of the smaller villages around here, it would be 50-100km to the store, yeah.
City dweller nonsense about how it's oh-so-inconvenient to wait N minutes extra for food delivery is just funny in this context. Bunch of babies, I tell ya. :P
I suppose if we had like 100 kids then the variances would probably average out and we'd waste far less leftovers. I'll bring that idea up with the spouse.
"Are you sure? That seems like a lot..."
"Yes-- we ate all of it in 2 days last week."
"Well, OK."
...
A week later, 90% of X is still sitting there. I try not to get too upset, because I remember doing the same thing when I was a kid. I'm better at predicting what I will actually eat these days.
In a place like NYC it's a little better because you're limited by how much you can carry. A daily trip to the grocery store/bodega is physically limited and I'd very often get just what my family of three needed.
The right balance is making a very specific meal/snack plan and going once a week (or less frequently if possible) and not going back throughout.
So I waste little of the food in the fridge. Most of my food waste is avocados, which seem to be ripe for about 5 minutes before spoiling.
That, or mashing them up ahead of time and freezing. Avocados freeze very well due to their specific make up.
Our food waste and costs have dropped dramatically, but we did have to make a 'sacrifice' of choice. Each week, the food that is produced for consumption in the house is decided not by us, but by what is produced and distributed by the farm. Due to this process, we might have lost choice, but we have gained, surprisingly, variety.
To expand on this idea: I think that the prevalence of choice in our supermarkets (example: fresh fruit in the middle of winter, wtf?) is massively inefficient, and should be reconsidered. Of course, when human society decides to get its collective act together and fight climate change, the point is moot. The entire 'choice regime' is dependent on high density fuels, and energy density will make these choices for us if/when carbon based fuels are made more expensive.
Basically, a smaller fridge might comes with lifestyle changes, but, also a much smaller cognitive load. If you can't store that much, you don't have to recall when you bought it, or what you still have.
In our house, a lot of food waste is in cooked or par-cooked food, which comes without a label, stored in a container.
I'd be very curious, but I do notice that the US wastes a ridiculous amount of food (~30% I've read in recent articles). We also have the largest refrigerators.
Of course, I seriously doubt you'd ever get any kind of regulation on refrigerator size in the US. But, it would be interesting to see how that compares with label changes. My suspicion is that in the US, the effects from label dates isn't that great. We just have too much stuff.
A large freezer - now that's a lifesaver. Buy in bulk or cook batches and win the game.
But a fridge? Once you go beyond N days of food per person, you're literally wasting food! It's impossible to use the space for the most part other than some condiments.
Lots of things have long shelf-lives and want cooling. Its not all about leftovers and vegetables.
And even vegetables have their place. We preserve (can/freeze) garden produce. Where to put it between harvest and processing? The fridge.
Study highlights:
> Institutional signals of food quality drive consumer food waste behaviors.
> Food-related routines affect whether refrigerated food gets eaten.
> Ambiguous date labeling decreases the odds that refrigerated food will be eaten.
> Respondents are systematically over-optimistic that refrigerated food will be eaten.
Honestly this is part of why I throw food out maybe more frequently than others do. The plethora of dates is extremely confusing. Pair that with the fact that I’ve had awful food poisoning a few times in my life and I end up tossing food out that’s probably still fine to eat, but I just don’t want to risk it.
Find the pattern and avoid those situations. There's no need to be wasteful by blindly following those arbitrary dates.
It's usually easy to tell when most food has spoiled by smelling or examining it. Another important aspect is making sure the food is cooked thoroughly.
Buy 100 fresh chickens from the supermarket. Then tell me which ones are contaminated with campylobacter just by smelling them. You can't.
You can't.
All smell tells you is when the food is rotting, but no-one eats rotting food because it smells foul and because it tastes foul.
People get food poisoning because pathogens often are not detectable by smell or taste.
Cook rice. Chill the rice. Store it correctly. Reheat it thoroughly.
Sniff it at every stage.
Can you smell the bacillus cereus, can you smell the toxins they produce? The toxins are not destroyed by heat from cooking, and this is a very common form of food poisoning.
Stop telling people they can smell food poisoning. They can't.
> It disingenuous to ignore the parent's very next sentence,
No, because parent poster is talking about ignoring the "arbitrary" food safety dates. If you ignore the date you significantly increase the risk of food poisoning, and not all of those are fixed by thorough cooking.
For many people food poisoning might be a few days of unpleasant illness, but we need to remember that it can also be a life-changing illness.
Most of what I buy has a 'best before end' (BBE) date, not a 'use by', which is not a 'food safety date'.
Many supermarkets in the UK are removing BBE dates from vegetables because of exactly this issue (and as discussed in the article) - people blindly chucking food that's fine because the date is yesterday's.
With a few exceptions, like going on vacation, I never throw away meat or fish, it's not that hard to manage, if I don't eat it within 1-3 days, I either freeze it, salt it or boil it. What you can do with what product requires a bit of experience, for example chicken must be boiled, pork and fish can be salted...
It's much harder with vegetables, because they are not all equal, you might keep an egg plant for a month and another one for a week. I highly recommend fridges with a vegetable compartment that monitor humidity and keep temperature just above 0°C, you can keep a salad in good condition for weeks in it.
For milk derived product, I think the date on the product is a big culprit here. You can eat yogurt weeks after the "best by" date. Same for cheese. The good thing is that it's easy to tell if a yogurt or cheese has turned bad. For cheese we don't eat quickly, I use a vacuum pump with a hard container. There are also some little tricks like putting old yogurt in front at the height of the kids.
- Wait until the food is 90+% gone before going to the grocery again. On the last day we might eat out once.
- Eat fresh food first, frozen/canned last.
- lots of containers for leftovers, they get gobbled in 24-48 hours.
- Walk to the local market when a few in demand items run out, like bananas, baby spinach, or coconut/almond milk.
Changing how I eat greatly reduced my food waste.
Now eating a lot of bulk foods with high soluble fiber. Porridge, beans, lentils, seeds. Instapot for the win. Uncooked (dry) stores very well.
All my excess produce goes into smoothies, also greatly reducing my waste.
My wife certainly treats the fridge like 'write only media' at times.
That seems like an exaggeration or maybe you're not storing them correctly. What do you buy and how do you store it that won't last several days to a week?
I buy and eat a lot of fruit and my experience agrees with OPs, at least in some cases.
So most of the time, fruits and vegetables keep for days and don't have to be eaten immediately, right?
I'm being not picky because this is a conversation in a thread about how people throw out a lot of food. That waste is due, in part, to false sense of spoilage and OP was furthering that false sense.
Nobody seems to want to fix the mold problem. They blame you, the consumer, for not noticing that the thing you were buying already had mold hidden in the center of the packaging.
The seller has a perverse incentive to keep foods sold by weight or by outward appearance moist. They even spray everything on the refrigerated bins with those stupid misters all the time. Cool, dry air would reduce the weight and generate a desiccated appearance over time.
I don't remember this happening when I was younger. Is it a flaw in my memory, or do fruits show mold faster now?
If your food is molding within two days, I’d guess it’s either your fridge or the grocer. Clean your fridge out with bleach and baking soda semi-regularly. If your house is humid, consider a dehumidifier and try not to leave the fridge door open too long.
I have also made it a habit of freezing half the meet or seafood when I buy in larger quantities. It is good to label when you freeze something as there is still a shelf life.
I remember several years back there was a post on HN about a food expiration database that showed true dates food was good until. Many times the sell by date is not the same as the good until date.
One example is eggs. They only stay good for 2–3 weeks, and I can't buy less than a half dozen. If I decide to make pancakes one morning (which I do occasionally, but rarely), that's one egg. I'll maybe find a use for one or two more before the batch goes bad. :(
Boiled or scrambled eggs are a fast easy meal, and can be made in units of 1.
My solution generally is to have standard stock meals and buy for those. There can be variety, though it's around the basics. And eating within a range rarely proves fatal.
That's horribly entitled and now I feel bad.
People think packaged food is more convenient or cheaper. Cooking from scratch isn't more expensive or time consuming. Not knowing how to cook and shop is expensive and time consuming.
Here's a great guideline for "best by" and other dates: if the product has one, don't buy it. I don't think I've bought a product with one in several years.
This doesn't make sense to me unless our locales differ greatly in labelling practices. Virtually everything but fresh produce comes with a date. Even independent butcher shops close the wrapping paper with a date sticker.
I was surprised to learn that it took less time, cost less, tasted better, and led me to see packaged food as unnecessary.
I wrote a bunch of posts on it since I felt my ignorance and inexperience kept me from a better life and wanted to make the experience available to others http://joshuaspodek.com/avoiding-food-packaging-2
Same here.