Seven tasty ways to stop wasting food

A new study shows we throw out a quarter of our food. Here are tips and super-easy dishes to help you eat it all

Published October 11, 2010 1:01PM (EDT)

Somewhere, in the back of your mind, you're a little terrified of the peak-oil apocalypse, where man turns on man and we start waging tribal warfare for what little dribs and drabs of fossil fuels we have left (wait, that hasn't happened already?). You traded in your car for a bike, you're praying for the solar power revolution. You know what's really going to give you a heart attack? A new study in the American Chemical Society's journal that found that Americans waste -- just straight-up throw away -- the equivalent of 350 million barrels of oil a year in the form of food. That's about 70 times the amount of oil in the BP Gulf oil spill.

Basically, we're tossing more than a quarter of all the food we grow, package, ship, buy, cook, serve and store, including almost a full third of all our dairy, grains and eggs. But I'm not wagging fingers; I've forgotten about stuff in my fridge, been too lazy to figure out what to do with stuff that's past its prime, and tossed my own share of food, much as it breaks my heart. But we can all listen to our better angels and eat the food we're fortunate to have, and here are a few tips on how to keep or use stuff up.

Read the seven tips

 


By Francis Lam

Francis Lam is Features Editor at Gilt Taste, provides color commentary for the Cooking Channel show Food(ography), and tweets at @francis_lam.

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Ethics Of Eating Food Food Advice Sustainable Food