Reducing Food Wastage using GTD

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timjamesbrennan

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I'm very aware of how much food is wasted at home - mostly because it gets pushed to the back of the fridge and forgotten about until it's gone bad.

I've been looking for some fridge shelf labels with "Eat within x days" or something like that, but nothing exists. Perhaps I will use my p-touch labeler to create my own on some plastic paper binding strips cut to length.

Has anyone else found a solution to this problem?
 
foil

I wrap leftovers in aluminum foil and label them with a sharpie. Alcohol will take sharpie ink off of many surfaces, so you can test labeling some containers and then clean off the writing with 90% rubbing alcohol.

I'm with you on the food wasting. I'm appalled at the amount of leftovers I end up throwing away. Getting the fridge organized would definitely go a long was to saving money at the grocery store.
 
Chickens & Location

timjamesbrennan;82115 said:
Has anyone else found a solution to this problem?
Click to expand...

The solution is chickens. If anything goes bad or gets too old to eat the chickens get a feast. They will eat most everything.. Many cities are now allowing a few chickens (usually hens, no roosters) even inside the city limits and I know for a fact that 2 bantam hens can be kept comfortably in a medium size bird cage with less hassle, mess or noise than a large parrot or macaw plus you get fresh eggs on occasion. :-)

Second is location. I have one area of the fridge reserved for leftovers and I look there first when making lunch or before starting dinner. I also plan for leftovers so I'll cook a large something expecting that the leftovers will be meals for several more days.
 
We have taken to writing notes on a small whiteboard on the front of the fridge, reminding us of leftovers to eat up within a few days. Simple and fairly effective.
 
Our approach is a little different. On a Sunday we do the food equivalent of a weekly review, we choose recipes for each evening of the coming week, list up the ingredients then go and buy. That way we only have the ingredients that we need for that week. We have plenty of store cupboard things that last a while (grains, spices etc), but fruit, veg and meat we only get enough for what we need for that. Sounds obvious, and was exactly what my gran did "back in the day" but is very uncommon now it seems.

Since we started doing that our wastage has dropped an enormous amount . The main problem we realised was not even buying too much food, its buying random items at the shops that dont go together to form a meal.

I did this before I got into GTD, and I remember being amused by how similar the concepts were to GTD - once week sit down, plan what you're going to do, make all the decisions on the front end, plot out the tasks & gather the resources so that when it comes to doing, everything's stacked in your favour.
 
bishblaize;82143 said:
Our approach is a little different. On a Sunday we do the food equivalent of a weekly review, we choose recipes for each evening of the coming week, list up the ingredients then go and buy.
Click to expand...

I do something similar. I pull out 8-9 recipe cards each week for meals that week. My recipes only contain a list of ingredients not real recipes but it gives me a focus. We have 2 big freezers as well as canned stuff and also get veges from local gardens and farms so don't do much shopping per se. What it does do is allow me to pull out of the freezer the items I need for the meals so they can be thawing. I try to have at least one long cooking time meal and one fast cooking meal so I can adjust what we have based on what the day has been like. I also will adjust based on what we get from the neighbors. Right now we;re getting a lot of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers and just starting the potatoes & garlic so that affects what we have.

Grocery shopping is typically for milk, bread, cheese, ice cream, tortillas, chips and salsa and not much else. :-)
 
That's a great idea man

timjamesbrennan;82115 said:
I'm very aware of how much food is wasted at home - mostly because it gets pushed to the back of the fridge and forgotten about until it's gone bad.

I've been looking for some fridge shelf labels with "Eat within x days" or something like that, but nothing exists. Perhaps I will use my p-touch labeler to create my own on some plastic paper binding strips cut to length.

Has anyone else found a solution to this problem?
Click to expand...

You can sell your idea for LG, GE, Keg fridge... and see. Luckily you can create one yourself while waiting for their replies. In my family, I trains my kids that they should eat the oldest ones first (which are in the lowest shelf). Of course i have to check frequently just in case they're rotten. Your idea is good, but everyday you have to move all the stuff in some shelve to another shelf, because one day has gone :cool:
 
This is a subject that my husband and I are just starting to tackle. So far the main thing I am doing is when I open a jar or packet of something that says "eat within x days of opening" I take a sticky label, write the "use by" date on it and stick it on the packet.

I think I'm going to have to start checking the contents of the fridge on a regular basis, as we keep forgetting things, expecially if my husband has bought them so they're not really on my radar. He's alway forgetting what he's bought, and as he's disabled he never gets to see inside the fridge.

Ruth
 
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