The 1 Trick You Need to Save Money and Stop Food Waste

Food waste is my nemesis for so many reasons.

If I’m completely honest, cooking has never been something that I’m excited to do. I do it because the alternative is that my family starves. Dramatic? Maybe…

So, yeah, the wasted food, I just can’t with it! Nothing pains me more than throwing food out. I envision throwing a fist full of dollar bills and about 30 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back– directly into the trash every time I’m forced to clean out the fridge.

A few months ago, I drew the proverbial line in the sand and said, enough is enough. Something had to change.

Why weren’t we eating the food?

The answer ended up being a few things, but the top of the list was simple laziness.

It’s already cooked and in the fridge– what more could someone want?

Convenience.

How was I going to make it more convenient? Simple.

I was going to pack the food into portion-sized containers.

They don’t call it ‘convenience packaging’ for nothing. You know what I mean?

There’s a reason that you pay a premium for pre-made salads, already portioned out cookies and crackers. Someone already cut up the entire pineapple for you?? Yes, please!!

So when you think about it in those terms, it actually makes quite a bit of sense. 

We already had a snack drawer in our fridge with cheese, cut up fruit + veggies, yogurt, etc. And as you can imagine, that was something my kids and husband would regularly visit.

So I committed an entire shelf in my fridge to the leftovers I was going to portion out.

That night, after dinner, when I was putting the leftovers up, I grabbed 2 or 3 quart-size containers and packed everything away. Easy peasy. 

You know what I realized after a week? It was working!

My husband could easily grab a container or two to take with him to work. I could quickly grab something while I was doing laundry. I could throw one into my kids’ lunch box and they could have a hot lunch instead of their regular sandwich. The kids get home and are staarrrrrrrving. Oh look, there’s a bowl of soup from last night.

I love it!

Side benefit, if you are one of those people who put the pot, pan or serving dish directly in the fridge *cough*, you don’t have to wait until you run out of leftovers to get those back. Not to mention, nothing’s really had time to cake onto it AND more room in your fridge. Winning!!

While no system is perfect, I’ll mark this down in the ‘win’ column, ya’ll!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Kristen

Kristen is the founder and content creator at Mom Managing Chaos where she teaches busy moms how to simplify and organize their life and finances. She writes about frugal living, budgeting, productivity and organization.