DDPHE Blog: How to Prevent Food Waste This Holiday Season
Published on November 22, 2024
The holidays are a time for gathering with loved ones, enjoying delicious food, and reflecting on what we're grateful for. However, it's also one of the biggest culprits of food waste in the United States, with millions of pounds of leftovers going to waste each year. From cooking too much to improper storage, there are several ways food can end up in the trash during the holiday season.
Each year, about 200 million pounds of turkey meat are thrown out over the Thanksgiving holiday week. Trashed along with it are all resources, including labor, water and energy, used to get it to our plates. Producing one pound of turkey meat uses 520 gallons of water; that is equivalent to running your shower for 75 minutes! And the greenhouse gas emissions from a pound of wasted turkey meat are equivalent to those from burning a half gallon of gasoline.
Read on to learn more strategies for preventing food waste this Thanksgiving, so you can make the most of your meal while being mindful of the environment and your budget. Let's dive into some practical tips from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to help reduce waste and make your holiday celebration more sustainable.
How can you make holidays a little less wasteful without added stress:
1. Plan your portions: Think ahead and figure out just how much you need to prepare for your party or meal beforehand with the NRDC Guest-imator. This tool allows you to input how many people you are hosting, what kind of eaters they are, what you are serving, and how much you want left over, and it suggests how much to prepare.
2. Shop with a list: Once you’ve planned out your portions, make sure to have a list when you do your shopping—and try to stick to it!
3. Get creative with your peels and scraps: When making a big holiday meal, there are lots of parts of food less commonly eaten that can be integrated into your meal. Making an apple pie? Skip the peeler. Those peels are nutrient-dense and taste great in pie! Or if you are a no-peel pie purist, save the peels for another recipe (for instance, you can add cinnamon and sugar and bake for a delicious apple peel chip appetizer). You can also keep a “stock bag” in your freezer where you can collect vegetables and meat trimmings to make a stock at a later date. Save the Food has lots of great recipe ideas for using food nose-to-tail (or root-to-shoot).
3. Serve smaller portions: If your guests tend to have a lot left on their plates at the end of the meal, use smaller plates for serving. That way, when guests pile food on their plates, the amount they’ve got is more closely aligned with what they will actually eat. If anyone is still hungry after the first pass, they can always go back for seconds. Or thirds.
4. Get excited about leftovers. Every family has their own leftovers traditions. Try a turkey noodle soup with homemade stock. If you have guests, you can always send them home with leftovers too. Ask your guests to bring reusable take-home containers.
5. Practice smart storage: Proper storage of food can increase its lifetime and reduce spoilage. Got celery? The best way to store it is in a glass on a shelf in your fridge. The Save the Food storage guide gives ideas on how to organize your fridge and offers tips and tricks for storing food to extend its life.
6. Freeze before you toss. As the shelf life of your leftovers and surplus ingredients comes close to an end, consider popping them in the freezer before it’s too late. Freezing food is like hitting a pause button; nearly anything can be frozen and rediscovered for a dark winter weeknight when you don’t have the energy to cook something from scratch.
7. Understand date labels: Those date labels you see on your food actually have very little to do with food safety. Except for infant formula, most food date labels are generally indicators of when food will be at its peak quality, not when it is no longer safe to eat. Our go-to strategy for deciphering whether food is safe to eat—if it’s been stored safely and there’s no visible mold, we rely on the sniff or taste test.
For more information about how Denver is tackling food waste, including time and money saving tips, visit our Food Matters Denver webpage.