Leftover Strategies

Food waste is a very real issue. I think about food waste and have for many years. I take food waste very seriously, because food is an important source of pleasure and also an enormous contributor to climate change, altho where it is in the overall priority queue is influenced heavily by how you categorize (United States, globally, and by how you categorize industries).

I’m about to say a bunch of stuff about the focus on food waste; please do NOT interpret this as me saying No One Should Worry About Food Waste. My thesis is: the wrong people are being asked to worry about food waste, and in very much the wrong ways.

A massive advice industry exists to help households … get through life and live their values and attain their goals. How to save money. How to invest money. How to spend wisely. How to get the most for your money. How to eat healthfully. How to eat cheaply. How to eat in a sophisticated way. How to enjoy life. In general, this advice industry has reliably churned out recommendations that contribute to food waste.

Women have been urged to either not exit the work force or to enter or re-enter the workforce, while their children are still young. Advice is given on how to juggle responsibilities at home to feed the family with participation in paid work. Early on, this was mostly of the form: get up early, stay up late, get exercise, work smarter, etc. Very, very, very judgey stuff. More recently, they have been urged to explicitly share these responsibilities with the children and other adults in the household.

Households have been urged to focus on unit price, to accurately compare the cost of goods, and frequently urged to buy larger amounts in order to improve the unit price. Costco, and other warehouse stores exist to incarnate this approach to shopping.

Households have been urged to eat out less to save money. Of course, eating out was one way to feed a family and move some of the work of food preparation outside the household. Convenience foods are another, but these are often also rejected, to save money, and to improve health by eating whole foods, minimally processed, eaten seasonally, without a lot of added salt, fats and sweeteners. Meal kit companies sprang up as an additional option within this space, and the pandemic caused restaurants that had never had much takeout business to start advertising family-meals and other replacements for cooking in the home, even tho everyone was now at home all the time.

The quantities of food for sale in United States grocery stores and other food outlets is quite large, compared to other places. It’s even bigger in warehouse stores. The focus on unit price also pushes sizes larger. Everything about this approach to Better Living by Buying a Lot at Once increases the volume of food in United States households.

The ubiquity of options for dinner — meal kit, takeout, drive through, sit down, convenience foods, meal replacements and scratch cooking — also increases the volume of food in households. This is absolutely obvious to anyone living here who gives it even a moment’s thought. It requires conscious thought and strategy to eat all the food that enters the home through various paths, before it becomes unsafe to eat.

And yet, writers of advice for how to reduce food waste in the home don’t address the systemic issues with anything like the number of paragraphs they devote to advocating for meal plans and shopping lists.

Shopping lists and meal plans are major contributors to food waste in the hands of any but the most expert. Advising someone who is trying to reduce the food they waste to start making meal plans and shopping lists is basically taking the dumpster fire of waste they already have and designating it a community landfill. Advocates of meal plans (virtually) never acknowledge the scheduling uncertainty that (virtually) everyone in the United States lives with. There may be 7 days in every week, but who knows how many of those days will involve a meal prepared at home, and even if you can be certain there will be two meals prepared at home, you can’t really have any certainty about the rest.

Lately, advice has trended towards more frequent shopping, but buying less on each trip. Given that United States grocery stores are designed to encourage impulse shopping, and advice to save money involves perusing coupons and special sales, it’s hard to imagine that helping very many people.

I’m going to stop here. It’s apparent that this is a setup. Advice on reducing food waste in the home is the last element of a rigged game, designed to get the person doing the shopping to buy far more than anyone could possibly eat and then somehow scramble to preserve it all for … later use.

Which will be never, ideally, so that this can be repeated all 52 weeks of the year or, if the more frequent shopping ideal takes off, even more often. You can definitely see here where the food waste is coming from. The United States is the central player in a global food system that overproduces (for good reason! No one wants starvation! We don’t even want people to go hungry.). There is more produced than we can possibly consume. _By_ _Design_. And yet markets being what they are, they would like us to buy it anyway. And then come the people who want to “fix” the “system” by “reducing” food waste in the home.

I am not going to endorse shopping lists or meal plans. I am actively opposed to shopping sales and clipping coupons and hunting for discounts. I did all of those things in my younger and poorer years, and if you are rich in time and poor in dollars, then you, like the young me, might find those to be beneficial. But I’m not here to save anyone any money by buying more. Instead, I’m going to describe the leftover strategies — how to frame how you manage what you already have — so that you can eat what you have. Food is going to enter your life. Short of locking yourself in a windowless room, it is unavoidable. Here are successful ways to manage it.

One final note: the pursuit of novelty, diet of the year, new cooking equipment, etc., all generate additional food waste. Whenever anyone is preparing unfamiliar foods or familiar foods in unfamiliar ways (or, worst, unfamiliar foods in unfamiliar ways), the odds that things won’t turn out well, or even if they do, that one won’t much care for the result are dramatically improved. Repetition is one of the most effective ways to reduce food waste.

Church Mom

Church Mom is, by definition, a person cooking for a family larger than one, and probably embedded in a community of people with regular habits that include sharing food on numerous occasions throughout the week, month and year. Post service cookies and coffee. Holiday meals. Potlucks.

Church mom is 5 hot dishes a week, a use-it-up night (leftovers night, clean the fridge, the week in review), and dinner out. Then start it up again.

Church mom’s pantry contains numerous copies of shelf-stable items that are used in the hot dishes. Church mom’s fruit drawer has several each of a small number of different fruits, whether in season or not (a bunch of oranges, a bunch of apples, bananas on the counter). There are salad makings in the vegetable drawer. The main part of the fridge contains beverages (milk, orange juice, apple juice, soda, beer, iced tea. . .). Members of church mom’s family may bring sandwiches in a bag or other container to work or school, but they might also eat at a cafeteria or get something at a deli.

There’s more than one way to do church mom, but church mom’s got a repertoire and it repeats. Taco Tuesday and Pizza Night are the Gospel of Church Mom.

Advanced church mom has a chest freezer full of ground beef, chicken parts, and homemade red sauce. It may also have bags of berries and fruit frozen after U Pick during the cheap season. If you need a bag of peas for a sore shoulder, Church Mom’s freezer always has some.

Hellman’s has a Cool Church Mom take on this strategy, with 3+1 meal design and flexipes. It gets rid of the hot dish in favor of burgers, sandwiches, noodle dishes, salads, etc., but also, inevitably, including Taco Tuesday.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a holiday for cooking in this style. You make a ludicrous amount of food, that even with a bunch of people helping out, you are definitely not going to finish. You send some home with everyone. The next meal is leftovers — just make a plate from all that stuff you put in the fridge. Then there are sandwiches. And after that come all the ways to use it up in a slightly different form: casseroles, pasta, stir fry, noodle dishes, scrambles, omelettes — whatever you can reconfigure it as, with or into.

I’m not saying cook a bird or a ham every 10 days or so. But you can cook a big meal, with plans for how you will revisit the contents as secondary and tertiary dishes.

Buffet

This is my preferred style, so I am partial to it. For me, it comes from two sources. First, I eat a lot of greens from the farm share, and a lot of mushrooms (ditto). They keep better cooked, take up less space, and are easy to integrate into other dishes that way. The non-salad vegetables and mushrooms that come into my fridge get cooked as soon as I have the time (ideally, when they enter the house, but the world is not a perfect place), almost always in exactly the same way. Fat and vermouth for the mushrooms; fat and vinegar for the greens. Some greens will get fat and soy sauce. Sometimes I’ll add ginger and/or garlic, depending on the vegetation and whatever future plans I might have for it. They are then stored in clear glass containers, stacked up where they are extremely visible. Opening the fridge to produce a meal then is a matter of pulling out containers, portioning, reheating (possibly with other, fresh-cooked ingredients) and plating (not necessarily in precisely that order).

Buffet is modularized Thanksgiving.

Chopped (or Fridge Wars or …)

There are a variety of cooking shows in which cooks compete by producing a meal from an unlikely set of ingredients.

Basically, food enters your life and your fridge. Every time you want to eat, you open up that fridge and make magic happen. This requires extensive repertoire, decisiveness and willingness to take risks with what you are planning to eat for dinner.

Spreadsheet

Occasionally, one sees pictures of the inside of a fridge with stacks of regular sized containers and day of the week / date labels, along with a word indicating breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner, etc. There are services that will produce and deliver these, and of course the logical end point of the exhortation to plan meals is this set up. I’ve only ever seen this attempted by women living alone, altho I feel confident that other people have done it.

I call it “spreadsheet”, because everyone I’ve ever run across who does it, puts the plan together in a spreadsheet, in order to produce the shopping list to cook it all. There are databases and websites and applications that purport to help one do this.

One Trick Pony

Single men living alone have fridges that tell you how they feed themselves when no one else is feeding them. A freezer full of frozen dinners, beer, milk, juice and a few condiments (possibly in sachets from takeout) was my first introduction to One Trick Pony.

One Trick Pony isn’t always _just_ one trick. Sometimes, there are a few. Milk is almost always key, because breakfast — and I’m Hungry and Need a Snack — is usually cereal. However, One Trick Pony usually also knows how to make pancakes, and might have toaster pastries or toaster waffles and if so, there will probably be a bottle of pancake syrup in the fridge as well, with butter. One Trick Pony may have peanut butter and jelly and bread, or cheese and bread. They might even have a head of lettuce and a bottle of ranch dressing. Kraft Parmesan might be sitting in the door of the fridge, to go with the frozen pizzas in the freezer. By the time One Trick Pony has a package of bacon, eggs, deli meat and pickles, however, One Trick Pony is well on their way to having actual cooking repertoire. And also having food waste.

All of these Leftover Strategies are styles, perspectives if you will, on the food one already has, and how it can be used to produce enjoyable, nourishing meals for oneself and possibly others as well. There are probably others! Figuring out your style or adopting a style, can help you use the food you already have. I’d like to say with certainty that if you can reliably prepare enjoyable, nourishing meals with what you already have, you’ll go to the store less often, and have a better idea of what to buy, but I don’t really know that for sure. If you are shopping recreationally, or some force in your life is causing you to go to the store even when you are quite capable of preparing food with what you already have that you already like and are looking forward to, there’s really not a lot I can do with that. You are allowed to say no.