Reducing Food Waste: Lessons From Raising Toddlers

One of my favourite things about being a mother is all the time I get to spend thinking about, shopping for, preparing and serving beautiful, fresh, organic food to my amazing children.

…and then cleaning the whole freakin’ lot up off the floor, furniture and far reaches of their small bodies. And watching as they stuff crackers in their mouths instead of going to bed.

Growing up in the country, food scraps went straight to the chickens and so it’s hard to say how much my family produced when I was a child. I doubt it was a lot; I feel like I ate whatever I was given and more. But the research I did in preparation for growing my own healthy little angels said I should keep putting a range of nutritious options on their plates and pretend I don’t care if they’re eaten or not. Apparently more focus = more pressure = food relationship weirdness (I may be paraphrasing the literature here).

I want my kids to learn to listen to their bodies, which are wired to tell them what they need and when they’re full. When we make them eat an arbitrary amount of food on a plate, or even “just one more bite,” we teach them to override their body’s messages; that someone knows better than what they feel. This is not what we want in most life situations.

Anyway, there I was, living in the city with my own small family and no chickens, filling a four-litre ice-cream container with wasted food every day. It hurt my heart.

The Australian Climate Council says:

• We throw out $5.2 billion worth of food each year, or one in three kilos.
• In landfill, that food waste produces around 6.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.
• The needless production, harvesting, transporting, and packaging of that food generates more than 3.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.
• It’s estimated that by 2050 up to 14% of emissions from agriculture could be avoided by better managing food use and distribution.

Some days it feels like half of that comes from my house and so for the last few years I’ve been working on it. Here are some things I can recommend in the name of reducing household food waste.

1. Start with ingredients, not recipes.

Did you ever watch the TV show Ready Steady Cook? Two teams — Capsicum and Tomato — made up of a professional chef and an audience member would get the same bag of ingredients and then compete to see who could come up with the best three-course meal. And that is how I like to live my cooking life.

I hate going to the shops and honestly I care less about the perfect balance of taste than how nutritionally dense I can make a meal using only ingredients on hand. I get a random box of seasonal produce delivered weekly and I’m also lucky to have family and friends who grow stuff and share. I enjoy the creative challenge of using up every last bit. My go-tos that you can literally chuck anything into include smoothies, roast veggie trays, salads, curries and soup. Speaking of soup…

Bone broth.

I feel slightly better about eating meat if I can use more of the animal and while I’m not quite making pate, I will always boil up any bones to make nutrient-rich broth for drinking and cooking. You pay good money for a quality collagen supplement but with bone broth you get so much of that goodness from something that literally would’ve got chucked in the bin. You can add veg and herb scraps too for more flavour and nutrients.

A random thing I’ve learned from working in process redesign is that excess stock in storage = wasted resources. Using up the stuff you have instead of heading to the shops every time you decide to cook something different will save you money, cupboard space and you’ll throw out way less expired food.

2. Grow what you can

Anything you can get straight from your garden is something that doesn’t have to be packaged and transported.

I’ve never claimed to be good at gardening or even enjoy it very much. But there’s something about producing your own food (even if it’s just limes for your margaritas) that motivates you to keep things alive. Also apparently kids are more likely to eat what they grow, although I’ve yet to see mine eat a vegetable out of our garden.

What I have grown to love about gardening is how quickly and simply you can ground yourself in nature, providing urgent stress-relief when you’re being screamed at and head-butted all day. Plus get yourself some parsley and a rosemary bush in and you’ll never have to buy one of those shitty jars of all-purpose seasoning again.

If you’re yet to experience success in the gardening arena then start with the easy and free stuff. Learn what does well in your area by snooping on your neighbours yards. Make friends with them and ask for seeds and cuttings or if that’s too much face-to-face, try your local Facebook groups.

You can also see if there’s a Grow Free cart in your area. Grow Free is a beautiful initiative where people freely give away all things gardening and fresh produce, with no expectation of anything in return.

3. Preserve everything.

Something that can be annoying about home-grown produce is ending up with too much of one thing all at once.

My parents grow heaps of fruit and vegetables (for fun?) and I often end up with grapefruit. Grapefruit remind me of the women’s magazine diets of the 90s. Honestly, they are shit. But margaritas are awesome. So that’s my main recommendation here: any over-abundance of fruit can be turned into delicious cocktails. Just add tequila and lime! And home-dehydrated lemon slices look super cute on top.

I don’t make jams or pickles or anything but if you can, do it. Whatever doesn’t go in meals or snacks I freeze or dehydrate. And some may find it gross but even all the fruit and veg I chop up for my kids to not eat… if it hasn’t been chewed up and spat on the floor, it’s going in my next smoothie.

4. Connect with a local biodynamic gardener.

Even with all of the above, the kitchen scraps pile up. I went to find a nearby keeper of chickens in my local Facebook group and after scrolling through the long, unsolicited debate around what chickens should be fed, I met Yvette.

Yvette has spent the last 20 years turning her sandy suburban block into an oasis of diverse and useful plant life, with a focus on building the soil. All forms of organic matter (now including our food scraps) are processed through composting, worm farms, chickens, bokashi, black soldier fly farms and more. She became a friend, sharing her knowledge and garden spoils with me, and going on to become a student of my writing course. And now she has her own gardening blog here!

I was lucky to make a special connection in Yvette but you can also use an app like Sharewaste to to connect with nearby people who’d love your kitchen scraps.

5. In-ground worm farms

I once had an above-ground worm farm made of styrofoam boxes but the worms got too hot and climbed out the top and then a rat family moved in and I was too traumatised by that to do anything else until Yvette taught me about in-ground worm farms. You dig a big, lidded, plastic bin with holes drilled in the sides into the ground, so the worms can escape out into the cool soil whenever they want, and then come back to compost the food scraps you place inside. You can fill up the bin and forget about it until the castings are ready to use in the garden. It’s such a low maintenance option! Full instructions here.

Many people turn “eco-conscious” when they have kids. It’s not just the whole having-a-place-for-our-grandchildren-to-live-that-isn’t-on-fire thing… it’s the sheer amount of waste we create in our children’s names, piling up around us.

I have nowhere close to nailed the zero-waste lifestyle but for me, food waste was an easy place to start. I never imagined that in my quest to live more sustainably, I would find so much connection to nature and the community.

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This post was previously published on Greener Together.

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