Reduce food waste with leftovers.

                                        Leftovers

In Europe, we waste around 88 million tons of food per year (Food Waste). How can we make a difference and improve? You can reduce food waste in your home by doing these three actions: reuse the leftovers to eat at lunch the next day, reuse the food to make another type of food and, can use the leftovers to make compost.

First of all, creating leftovers purposely is a good way of planning. Nowadays,

we don’t eat balanced quantities of food. By using the leftovers the next few days, you create a plan and you make sure to not throw it away. Another reason is that by making more food that you know you are going to use the days after, you don’t lose a lot of time because you already have it ready. In case you want to save it for more days, you can freeze it so there are no reasons to throw it away (Mooth). 

Another way to avoid food waste is to reuse the ingredients already used in a dish, or you even can reuse the whole dish and enjoy it another time. Some examples would be cutting the part of onions 

that you haven’t used and use it to make another plate for example “broth”. Broth can last from 5 to 7 days, so it is less probable that you are going to waste it. Not only can you reuse it to make plates, for example you can make tomato sauce (McClees).

Finally, an idea to not waste food is to compost it. This can be good because it doesn’t matter how much you waste because you will still be able to compost it. This makes your land richer and much

more fertile. This adds fiber and nutrients to the land so apart from not wasting food you can make your garden a profitable place. The bad thing about this solution is that not everyone has a garden to make it happen (Spengler).          

In conclusion, these three given solutions could make a big difference if everyone would try them out. If everyone tried at least one of them, we could already start decreasing the amount of food wasted from those 8 million tons! Adopting these three solutions will save us money and time, and in addition, save the environment.

“Food Waste”. ec.europa.eu. European Commission. 2016. Web. Mar 4 2020.

McClees, Heather.“How to Reuse Leftovers to Create New Dishes and Reduce Waste”.onegreenplanet.org. OneGreenPlanet. 2018. Web. Mar 4 2020. 

Mooth, Bryn. “Don’t Throw That Away! 10 Creative Ways to Use Leftovers”. ivaluefood.com. Sustainable America. 2014. Web. Mar 4 2020.

Spengler, Teo. “How to Use Leftover Food for Mulch in Your Garden”. homeguides.sfgate.com. Sfgate. Web. Mar 4 2020.