> Ambiguous date labeling decreases the odds that refrigerated food will be eaten.
Honestly this is part of why I throw food out maybe more frequently than others do. The plethora of dates is extremely confusing. Pair that with the fact that I’ve had awful food poisoning a few times in my life and I end up tossing food out that’s probably still fine to eat, but I just don’t want to risk it.
Did you get food poisoning from home cooked food or when you were eating out?
Find the pattern and avoid those situations. There's no need to be wasteful by blindly following those arbitrary dates.
It's usually easy to tell when most food has spoiled by smelling or examining it. Another important aspect is making sure the food is cooked thoroughly.
It disingenuous to ignore the parent's very next sentence, which recommends cooking food properly. It's estimated that the majority of raw chicken sold in the UK carries campylobacter, and a major factor in making sure it doesn't poison you is cooking the chicken through. No one is recommending eating raw meat and using your nose to tell whether that's OK.
Granted the most charitable reading only implies their use for spoilage, in the context of food poisoning it's dangerous to recommend using your eyes and nose as tools. Even if followed by advice on thorough cooking.
Cook rice. Chill the rice. Store it correctly. Reheat it thoroughly.
Sniff it at every stage.
Can you smell the bacillus cereus, can you smell the toxins they produce? The toxins are not destroyed by heat from cooking, and this is a very common form of food poisoning.
Stop telling people they can smell food poisoning. They can't.
> It disingenuous to ignore the parent's very next sentence,
No, because parent poster is talking about ignoring the "arbitrary" food safety dates. If you ignore the date you significantly increase the risk of food poisoning, and not all of those are fixed by thorough cooking.
For many people food poisoning might be a few days of unpleasant illness, but we need to remember that it can also be a life-changing illness.
> No, because parent poster is talking about ignoring the "arbitrary" food safety dates.
Most of what I buy has a 'best before end' (BBE) date, not a 'use by', which is not a 'food safety date'.
Many supermarkets in the UK are removing BBE dates from vegetables because of exactly this issue (and as discussed in the article) - people blindly chucking food that's fine because the date is yesterday's.
I’ve been thinking this for a while, but always thought the problem wasn’t overestimation of food needs, but rather aversion to making more frequent grocery trips (pushing people to “stock up”.
It's quite a hard problem when you think about it.
You're keeping track of potentially 100+ items, all need storing differently, all go off at different speeds, and you need to predict when you'll need more. You're basically running a shop in your head.
Seen in that light, just as it's not advisable to try and run a business in your head, it shouldn't be advisable to try and run your kitchen the same way.
To solve the problem you would essentially need to keep a list of when things were put in and when they will spoil. But then you have the secondary problem of figuring out how to combine existing near spoiled ingredients into meals.
"combine existing near spoiled ingredients into meals."
How do you think the Hawaiian pizza was invented?
Edit: More seriously, a meal plan can help. Check the fridge to see what needs using, write a meal plan based on that, write a shopping list based on the plan. Not onerous when you get used to it.
Exactly this. Most people have enough of a routine that they can predict what they'll be eating for the week. Plan the meals for the week before you go shopping then make a list of what you'll need for those meals.
We don't even have a list. We just always take the same path through the store and know what we need to pick up at each spot along the way.
The only thing that really throws us off is if we end up eating out with friends once or twice and then our "snacking" food runs out faster than our "meal" food. Usually we base our grocery trips on when we run out of milk though, which happens pretty predictably.
Must be different sorts of suburbs than the ones I'm familiar with. Most of the bedroom communities around here have grocery stores, restaurants, etc. since that is where people are when they aren't at work.
I always heard it was the inner city people and the rural people that didn't have grocery stores easy to get to.
Its half an hour for met to get the a grocery on the edge of the next town. But really, it is any easier to get across midtown for a city dweller? Congestions drops geometrically with distance from the city center, at least in Midwestern towns. So I barely see a car until I'm almost to the store.
Rural living here: I always find the conversations around 'meal planning' or just trip planning in general fascinating.
We're 30-45 minutes away from the nearest store, let alone grocery store or supermarket. We make 1 trip every 2 weeks to stock up on groceries, and often plan the entire month in advance. We grow and can our own vegetables, because fresh vegetables are too far away and don't store as well long-term.
The push for meal planning, I'm now realizing, is weird to me because we've always done that. That it is a function of the physical space I occupy has never occurred to me.
In 2010, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that 23.5 million Americans live in "food deserts", meaning that they live more than... 10 miles from a supermarket in rural areas.
I'm with you on that 10 miles is nothing. I would love to have a store within 10 miles - that's biking distance even.
But to me - because food deserts have a larger impact on low-income folks, I think about it in their context. If I didn't have access to a reliable form of transportation, 10 miles would be a super long way to have to travel.
Right. I mean it's basically that the distance here is defined quite strictly when it really depends on the individual.
I could be 200km from the nearest grocery store, and it'd just mean I need to stockpile a bit more, because as you say, assuming there are roads etc, I can jump in the car whenever and go there.
By contrast someone who's poor and severely disabled might feel they're in a 'desert' if the nearest store is 200m away and they can't walk.
I just spent 3 weeks living in a small village. There was a grocery store in the town. The next one was, as you say, 50-100km away.
If you lived in one of the smaller villages around here, it would be 50-100km to the store, yeah.
City dweller nonsense about how it's oh-so-inconvenient to wait N minutes extra for food delivery is just funny in this context. Bunch of babies, I tell ya. :P
Are there no farmers selling fresh produce anywhere around? I'm so used to these drive-by honesty stores (take what you want - usually vegetables, fruit, eggs, milk, honey etc - and pay in the box) in rural areas.
Suburbs are the exact places that have grocery stores everywhere. Some urban places have them spread out between business or factory districts and residential districts. Suburbs usually have them every few miles.
We have three kids and the amount each of them eat varies wildly from day to day. Sometimes they are fighting over who gets the swipe the last sauce out of the pot, other days they are "not hungry" and hardly eat anything. So some days we have a lot of leftover.
I suppose if we had like 100 kids then the variances would probably average out and we'd waste far less leftovers. I'll bring that idea up with the spouse.
A week later, 90% of X is still sitting there. I try not to get too upset, because I remember doing the same thing when I was a kid. I'm better at predicting what I will actually eat these days.
Stocking up is generally a smarter choice economically and I'm not sure more frequent trips helps reduce waste.
In a place like NYC it's a little better because you're limited by how much you can carry. A daily trip to the grocery store/bodega is physically limited and I'd very often get just what my family of three needed.
The right balance is making a very specific meal/snack plan and going once a week (or less frequently if possible) and not going back throughout.
It's the opposite for me. I grocery shop once a week and seldom eat away from home. It helps that the nearest supermarket is almost a two hour round trip. As a result I eat what I buy each week or have to eat canned or dried foods, which I don't much like.
So I waste little of the food in the fridge. Most of my food waste is avocados, which seem to be ripe for about 5 minutes before spoiling.
Well grocery store trips are a time consuming hassle (and I have a decent grocery store within walking distance). So it makes sense to save time by stocking up, even if that results in a little food waste.
For my family, the simple trick of getting a smaller fridge cut down on food waste. This has worked great, even though, we are avid cooks who almost always make meals from scratch.
I've figured out meats. I can vacuum-seal, freeze and throw right into sous vide. Veggies and especially fruit have to be eaten almost immediately or they go bad (mold). I eat a lot of zucchini and carrots because they'll keep a while.
> Veggies and especially fruit have to be eaten almost immediately or they go bad (mold).
That seems like an exaggeration or maybe you're not storing them correctly. What do you buy and how do you store it that won't last several days to a week?
Mold is a common problem for small soft fruit that come in plastic clamshells, like blueberries and raspberries. Often it has a little mold right from the store. I try to wash these in water with a some white vinegar as soon as I get home from the grocery store and then right in the fridge.
There can definitely be too much mold to eat right when you open it. You can usually return it, but for a couple of bucks it's a hassle. And if you don't wash it right away, even a small amount of mold will grow to more than you want to try to wash/cut off in a couple of days.
I buy and eat a lot of fruit and my experience agrees with OPs, at least in some cases.
So most of the time, fruits and vegetables keep for days and don't have to be eaten immediately, right?
I'm being not picky because this is a conversation in a thread about how people throw out a lot of food. That waste is due, in part, to false sense of spoilage and OP was furthering that false sense.
Blueberries and raspberries are an "eat on the drive home" treat for us. We do have giant 10lb bags of frozen berries that we keep at home. We get them from a Mennonite bulk food store. Not sure where else you can buy such things.
I have long suspected that the switch from basket-like paper containers to plastic clamshell containers has contributed to mold growth. By the time you buy it, it is already too late, because it has been sitting in that plastic moisture prison so long already. The mold is already there. If it were coming from my kitchen, wouldn't it affect the topmost fruits first, rather than the bottommost?
Nobody seems to want to fix the mold problem. They blame you, the consumer, for not noticing that the thing you were buying already had mold hidden in the center of the packaging.
The seller has a perverse incentive to keep foods sold by weight or by outward appearance moist. They even spray everything on the refrigerated bins with those stupid misters all the time. Cool, dry air would reduce the weight and generate a desiccated appearance over time.
I don't remember this happening when I was younger. Is it a flaw in my memory, or do fruits show mold faster now?
It probably depends on what you eat, where you shop, and how you store your food. I can't imagine it's easy to run a produce department and the whole produce supply chain. Often people pick food that's been sitting around for a while.
They tend to excrete their moisture really quickly though and it messes up the cooking process because consumer burners/ovens can’t keep up with all that extra water coming out so quickly and you end up steaming things 90%of the time
One thing that helps is doing a vegetable scramble with anything that needs to be used up in the morning, falling back to shelf-stable cereals otherwise...
Different fruits and veggies produce and are sensitive to ethylene. You can find lists online of which are which, but they should be stored separately or you’ll see them go bad much more quickly. With some exceptions like avocados and berries, all the fruits and veggies we store are good for at least a week.
If your food is molding within two days, I’d guess it’s either your fridge or the grocer. Clean your fridge out with bleach and baking soda semi-regularly. If your house is humid, consider a dehumidifier and try not to leave the fridge door open too long.
I’m not sure why you were downvoted. In my experience, one reason why food goes to waste is because the further it travels back to the fridge the more likely it is to be forgotten. Of course, that isn’t the only reason and that process seems to be biased toward certain kinds of foods. Worth examining, though. Perhaps shallower fridges make sense.
One of the best tips I learned about reducing food waste is to freeze bread and avoid putting it into the fridge. Frozen bread stays fresh and can go directly into a toaster or toaster oven:
Harold McGee replies: Good point to bring up! Bread and other lean baked goods are the exception to the rule that cold storage is good. Bread stales faster at refrigerator temperatures than at room temperature. So if you want to keep a loaf for a couple of days, a breadbox is better than the fridge. For much longer than that, the freezer is the best place.
I can only get through a loaf every couple of weeks, so I keep a loaf in the freezer, and only slice off a couple slices at a time. Let them sit on a towel for 5 minutes, and they're as good as fresh without the need to toast them. Plus, it's easier to slice while frozen without smooshing it, and fresh sliced beats store sliced any day of the week.
This is why I do my cooking in the workshop so I can use the table saw. A crosscut sled with a stop block is hard to beat for cutting many toast slices to the same width. And of course there’s no better potato peeler than a lathe.
It's mainly used to cut sashimi slices from a fillet without thawing the fish first. It goes in the fridge with bite-sized nigiri-sushi rice wads, and is defrosted by lunch time the next day.
It occasionally gets used to make really thin slices out of slightly stale bread.
My wife and I do something similar, but we cut our loaves into quarters. That gives us maybe 3-4 slices of bread for each quarter loaf, which is generally plenty for a couple days—and if we need more (i.e. planning to make sandwiches or something), we'll just pull out two quarter loaves. I've found frozen bread to be a pain to cut, so we prefer this method.
Depends on the cheese, and on the usage, really. My mom works at a cheese factory, so I regularly get more cheese than I know what to do with, so most of it ends up in the freezer. Non-aged cheese (not familiar with the English terminology, sorry) is absolutely no problem to freeze in my experience. Aged cheese, at least the ones I eat, crumbles completely after defrosting, absolutely impossible to slice - but I only use aged cheese for pizza and other stuff that goes into the oven, so the fact that it falls apart just by touching it is more of a feature for me - no need to grate it!
It depends, I buy a large block of cheddar, cut off a weeks worth and freeze the rest. The frozen cheese of course does not retain the texture but is fine for meals calling for melted cheese. Cheddar usually comes in quantities that would mold if kept in a fridge until consumed for me, so it’s either waste excess by letting it mold or having meals with melted cheese for a few weeks.
Frozen fruit pieces are amazing, I swear they taste sweeter than than they did before freezing. Especially bananas and grapes. Could the freezing be converting starches to sugar?
In addition to freezing, pickled and fermented foods will last a long while. Beyond that we just meal-prep what we know we need for the week. In the past we'd cook "a little extra" to be on the safe side but it goes to waste so often and frankly we'd rather spare Friday night for either a new cooked meal or takeout.
You buy 2-3 slices of bread every morning? Or are you buying some kind of roll or smaller unit of bread? The smallest unit of bread most people are able to buy is a loaf, and for me, it takes a week or two to go through a loaf of bread.
This is pretty common in most of Europe (especially Spain and France). People will buy a (demi) baguette or equivalent every day and it'll get eaten. We're not talking about sliced bread.
Which is easy to do in Europe, because you have a bakery on every corner, so it takes a 5 minutes walk to get fresh bread. In the US the nearest place selling bread might be 10 minutes car ride from home.
Not in every place in the US you need a car, not in every place in Europe you have a bakery around the corner. We are talking half-continent sized areas with several hundred million people. There is quite a variance.
But more to the point, good quality bread has been more ingrained in the culture of several (but not all) European countries than in the US, and while the wheels are turning, it seems to take some time.
More that the idea of eating a small loaf of bread, daily, is - as the sibling comment says - culturally ingrained in many European countries. It doesn't necessarily need to be a "real" bakery. Lots of people make do with supermarket bread.
But also bear in mind that in some places, eg rural France, it might well be a ten minute drive to the baker in the next village. People will still do it daily, or several times a week.
Also the case in the middle east and Asia, though it tends to be flat breads of various kinds. And in some places like India it's more common to just make it yourself.
One reason is that you don't have a bakery around the corner. If it takes more than 10 minutes to buy something, I'm probably not going to do it every day or two.
Another is that you consume significantly less than even a small loaf of bread. I haven't been to a bakery that will sell you individual slices of bread, or even parts of a loaf. Maybe this is different in other countries (I live in the US).
Because I have more money than time? I despise wasting my time doing stupid errands everyday, I rather buy a lot of food at one time and throw away most of it.
If the godfather of modern food science says it, I'll believe it. I freeze lots of breads, but rarely wind up using them as bread. More often they get cut up for breadcrumbs or bread pudding or stuffing.
This seems counter to my experience with bread. I wonder if it differs based on bread type. The whole grain stuff I buy grows mold noticeably faster if left out compared with being stored in the fridge.
By "stays fresh" I think the OP means "doesn't go stale", not that it doesn't go moldy. Bread in the fridge dries out considerably faster than bread sitting out.
Bread staling is actually somewhat separate from drying. The cooked starch recrystallizes, and it's the low temperature in the fridge that accelerates this.
It's weird, in my experience, bread almost never goes stale. It goes bad by going moldy. I wonder if the bread I eat (usually the industrially produced wheat bread) has higher moisture content than breads of yore.
Are you keeping it in a plastic bag? That traps the moisture that lets it mold. A proper bread box is designed to let bread dry out slowly so it doesn't mold.
Are you keeping the bread in an open or a closed container, and what's the humidity in the room like? Here at home at 25 deg Celsius and <60% rel. humidity, a correctly stored whole grain bread doesn't grow mold in a week. It's rare that I keep bread that long, though (usually 4 days max). Closed containers don't work well, there needs to be some air exchange.
edit: If no air exchange, it dries slower, inviting mold. There is such a thing like an ideal "drying to age" ratio to keep age-related staleness at a minimum w/o having to care for mold. What I mean is, older bread should be drier than fresh bread, not too much, not too little. Correctly kept, it dries out (only after several days) instead of getting moldy.
About your situation: I've to admit that I don't know about keeping bread well in such bad conditions. I'd try a slightly more sealed container, or if that doesn't work, slice and freeze it fresh. Other than that, find uses for dry bread (works perfectly fine in soup, or if white bread, make breadcrumbs etc. etc.).
20% rel. humidity is so low that it is very uncomfortable for humans, even unhealthy for some people. Are you really sure that's your in-house humidity? Outside/inside are often very different, due washed clothes drying, cooking, plants, respiration, and also humidity from the cellars in some buildings.
If yes, and if possible, I'd recommend an air humidifier to get that up to 40% or so. Depending on volume, a $60 unit should be able to do this, even if it will take three weeks until the humidity slowly approaches sensible levels.
I find that a lot of food can be frozen - bread is the first thing that comes to mind but also many that are added to dishes (milk, condiments) or reheated/cooked before consumption. Berries and fruit are also good at freezing.
I find this hard to believe, because for the last 6 months I've been refrigerating deli style breads in their plastic and they last weeks instead of days.
When I was a kid I would make my lunch each morning with frozen bread. By the time lunch rolled around, I had nice soft bread and the sandwich was still cold, so I could safely put turkey and mayo in a sandwich.
If you want to thaw it without toasting it, and like me have a crappy toaster where you never can figure out how to heat it enough to thaw without also partly toasting it, I've found that a short time in the microwave thaws frozen sliced bread very well. (Well, frozen sliced wheat bread. I haven't tried other varieties).
If you aren't in a hurry, it also thaws pretty well on the counter. About 10 minutes seems to do the trick.
I wish someone had told me all this a long time ago. For the first 35+ years of my adult life buying bread either meant wasting a lot, or eating a lot more sandwiches and toast than I would have liked.
The other frozen thing I wish I'd known about a lot earlier is microwave "steam in bag" frozen vegetables, such as [1]. They are only $0.78 at my local store, which is way cheaper than the canned vegetables I used to buy, taste way better, and are trivial to prepare (stick bag in microwave for 5 minutes, let stand for 1 minute).
> One of the best tips I learned about reducing food waste is to freeze bread and avoid putting it into the fridge. Frozen bread stays fresh and can go directly into a toaster or toaster oven:
As a french person, the idea that you would put bread in the fridge just horrifies me. But then most of the stuff labelled as bread in the US really isn't bread.
A bread machine will make both your bread a million times better, both taste and ingredients-that-are-inside wise.
The "good" expensive bread that is sold in the US at $5-6 a loaf never lasts more than a few days anyway - it's just too tasty and gets eaten quick
And the imitation "sandwich" bread that tastes like cardboard and sawdust easily lasts for 3+ weeks regardless of where and how it is stored. Which makes me marvel at what it's made of that it doesn't go bad in a month.
Bread machines are tricky and very messy. They don't produce enough heat to fully cook bread through like it would in a proper commercial oven. At least that was my experience with all the consumer-grade bread machines. YMMV
I have a breadmaker and love it. Pop the ingredients in as you go to bed and come down in the morning to the smell of fresh, warm bread. The bucket is non-stick so really easy to pop out your loaf and clean up. You're right that some models are a poor experience though. If you ever fancy giving one a go again, I'd recommend one of Panasonic's (https://www.panasonic.com/uk/consumer/home-appliances/breadm...) machines. I'd never use anything else.
How long does the French baguette last in France? Do you get them fresh daily and finish them off? Or is it just the baguette we get here dry out so quickly?
Not French, but moistening the baguette, putting it in foil and back in the oven for a couple of minutes gets it back to almost new state, and still nice and crusty.
I and various other family members discovered the hard way that frozen > defrosted bread led to serious stomach discomfort — apparently because of the changes that happen to the starches when they're frozen. They change from their normal state into a 'resistant' starch, which can cause you problems if you have a tendency towards something like IBS.
"Freezing turns starch into resistant starch... this means that your body gets far fewer calories from the bread. In effect, the resistant starch feeds your gut bacteria, rather than feeding you."
Absolutely. If you can cope with it, it's a win. It's just important to note that the bread that comes out of the freezer is materially different to the bread that went in.
There are some things that people just get a lot better at with life experience, like managing your food. When I was younger my fridge was full of moldy takeout containers. Now I use a meal planning app that generates a shopping list for me (plus other staples that we go through like hand fruit, bread, milk etc.) My grocery bill for home cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner 5-6 days a week for a family of 4 is about $200 a week. I think it's kind of high, but we mostly eat fresh meat, veggies, and fruit, not much grain or processed food, and we waste almost no food. We do spend on average an hour a day preparing lunch and dinner, but that's usually family time where we're all in the kitchen talking. One of my favorite feelings is after putting everything away from a grocery shopping trip and seeing my kitchen and refrigerator full of healthy food that I know will nourish my family for the upcoming week.
edit: App I use is eMeals, I tried several and this is my favorite so far, we are on the Paleo plan right now but they have maybe 8 or 10 different plans and you can switch pretty much at will. If anyone else has one they love please let me know!
Not the OC, but I've used https://www.plantoeat.com/ for a couple of years now, cooking for a family of five. It's a wonderful tool, especially for only $5 month.
Instacart has helped our family because we can have 2-3 deliveries a week with fresh produce. Before, it was such a hassle to bring kids <5 yrs old shopping that we would stock up...
Much of the vaccines storages are going to die and are regularly replaced just to die again, but if you keep highly optimized storage just for current purposes, you are screwed big time in the case of outbreak.
An interesting related question -- can refrigerator design help to address this issue?
We have one of those side-by-side fridges with more shelf depth than shelf width. The design results in food getting pushed far back where it is easy to miss/forget food that is there and difficult to access food without causing an avalanche of containers. I often wonder if our (rented) home had a different style of refrigerator if we would deal with less forgotten/spoiled foods.
Honestly I don’t think there is any innovation in the appliance space. The companies take the same components slap a new face plate on them or a led display and sell the same shit at different price points. In 2019 I’m still not sure that you can get a PID controlled oven or fridge and that should be trivially easy to implement.
Modern fridges have temperature sensors, per-drawer ventilated air-cooling, auto-detection of when particular high-thermal mass un-frozen food (i.e. a turkey) is added and start quick-freezing, and provide alarms when door or cooling fail. Also, energy efficiency for the EU A+++ rated units is really good.
And you get that already for the cheap units.
So, it's a freezer, it freezes, and it doesn't send a post to Facebook. The only complaint I would have is their loudness. Modern extra-slow compressors are often (perceived) louder than previous-gen units.
Also: given that even DIY ovens usually start with "get a cheap PID controller from e-bay", I doubt that commercial ones use anything else.
My fridge is modern but pretty simple. It’s really just a freezer with a vent that regulates fridge temps. It’s got some othe functions like defrost and seal warming but it’s a remarkably crude device
Appliances, in my opinion, are a racket that artificially creates stratification among models to provide a variety of price points.
That said, very few refrigerators out of the large number of available models (many more than say dishwashers or clothes washer/dryers) have the same interior layout.
Even two nearby models from the same manufacturer with minor feature differences will have significantly different layouts, to the point that you can't just choose to get a fridge with or without feature X without also choosing between differences in the likely more important aspect of layout.
It has always struck me as completely silly that fridges are seemingly designed so that their contents are maximally occluded. My solution has been to have 3 to 4 large plastic containers, Tupperware, etc., in the 1.5 - 3 gallon (~6-12 liters) range. Each gets a thematic selection of contents, e.g. one for leafy greens, one for "solid" veggies like peppers and cucumbers, and one for proteins (meat, cheese, tempeh). The advantages are:
- Every time you pull out the bin, you get a reminder about what you have, and what is going bad
- A meal is fairly easily structured by drawing one or more times from each bin
- It's much easier to clean a bin than to clean the whole fridge; you can move the contents into a new bin and clean the old one
- Food stays fresher because it's in airtight containers, and not subject to the horrid dry air of the fridge
- I know roughly how many person-days of food are in a bin —— so I can plan when to go to the store
- It's really easy to know what kind of food to buy more of when you go to the store —— bin closest to empty.
The one gotcha is that some bins can't be out of the fridge for long (e.g. meat), but generally the bins have sufficient thermal mass that 3-5 minutes on the counter inspection and choosing a few ingredients isn't going to cause any spoilage.
As with most things, it's the input that's the problem. Just getting most people to scan what they take in and out and how much is used is problematic, not to mention entering what leftovers are and printing labels or something for them.
After switching to a counter-depth over a standard size, I must agree. I see nearly everything in the fridge, and its harder for things to get lost. The wider door was annoying at first, but now I would never go back.
The downside is that the larger door would mean the fridge would lose coldness a lot faster when opening the door. What if we had "chest fridges" like chest freezers, which preserve temperature very efficiently?
Losing coldness due to opening door is really not very relevant. Most of the cold in a fridge is stored in the items you keep in the fridge, not in the air itself. A typical fridge holds maybe 1 kg of air inside it, and cooling 1 kg of air by 17 Kelvings is 17 kJ, which is probably a minute of compressor running. Opening a fridge and losing all cold air from it thus costs you probably something like a quarter of a cent.
Creating a chest fridge from a freezer is actually trivial at least in simple chest freezer units. Just swap out the thermostat for a fridge one and everything works. The freezer thermostats just work on a different temperarure range but they're interchangeable.
I learned this when I was about to hack together a chest fridge with a PID controler and the appliance repair shop where I went to get parts gave me the XY problem question. Once I told them what I was doing they just did the thermostat replacement instead in no time.
The feature you want is called "counter depth" - I bought a new fridge just yesterday, and I chose this style. Its shelves are much wider than they are deep, so it's easy to see what's inside all at once. Its capacity is lower than the standard-sized fridge I used to have, but I'd rather store less stuff and use more of it.
If I were one to build appliances, I would probably start by pumping liquid refrigerant through thermally-conductive shelves, and dispense entirely with blowing the cold air around. Air has almost no thermal mass. Water with a bit of ammonia dissolved in it is probably what is circulating through aluminum tubes.
Put the food to be chilled directly on the cold shelf, and the heat is removed by conduction, rather than convection.
Once we have that squared away, separate the portion of the appliance responsible for removing the heat from the portion responsible for storing the food. Stop selling the ugly awkward insulated cabinet attached the refrigerator. Now you have your standard back end, which does nothing but circulate fluid at a specific temperature through external hoses, and a customizable variety of front ends with standardized refrigeration hose fittings.
I'd want my insulated food storage cabinets to have evacuated double-paned glass windows in them, proximity-activated fluorescent tube lights, be relatively shallow for fridge shelves, and have pegboards on the back wall. I hate having to move front-food around to get to the back-food. It should all be front-food, which means shelves that are wide and not deep. One cannot do this with a monolithic appliance. One can easily do this with modular parts.
The deepest foods I ever want to store are large pizza boxes. Even those don't fill up the entire depth of a typical fridge.
Is this some American thing? Because I can say that I very, very, very rarely throw away food. I throw away like two minor things every year, and only because they are completely inedible. It's just so alien to me to think of people who regularly throw food away :/
It took me (us as we are a family now) to get a good system to manage food.
With a few exceptions, like going on vacation, I never throw away meat or fish, it's not that hard to manage, if I don't eat it within 1-3 days, I either freeze it, salt it or boil it. What you can do with what product requires a bit of experience, for example chicken must be boiled, pork and fish can be salted...
It's much harder with vegetables, because they are not all equal, you might keep an egg plant for a month and another one for a week. I highly recommend fridges with a vegetable compartment that monitor humidity and keep temperature just above 0°C, you can keep a salad in good condition for weeks in it.
For milk derived product, I think the date on the product is a big culprit here. You can eat yogurt weeks after the "best by" date. Same for cheese. The good thing is that it's easy to tell if a yogurt or cheese has turned bad. For cheese we don't eat quickly, I use a vacuum pump with a hard container. There are also some little tricks like putting old yogurt in front at the height of the kids.
Three things I have found that help to cut down food waste (and times pent at the grocery store):
- Develop a notion of cadence: how much food could you get through in a given interval (3-7 days), and how will this be affected by visitors, eating out, and travel. This might seem obvious but it's not — a lot of people have a "stocking up" mentality — if I buy a lot now, I won't need to go to the store for a while--that leads to suboptimal nutrition, more trips to the store, or eating out more b/c the fridge is empty. Using a standardized interval makes it much easier to learn adjustments.
- Develop an inventory of "endgame" meals that are less perishable that you can always have on hand so you can maintain your cadence. Examples: Halloumi (grilling cheese, good for months), tacos (canned beans; refrigerated tortillas, cheese, peppers and onions are good for weeks), pasta (olive oil and parmesean). Things like charcuterie, esp smoked and jarred meats, and fermented foods were originally invented by peasants to last for a long time and they still have their use, whether you are peasant or not. By contrast, there are "opening" meals like fresh seafood, which really should be eaten on the same day as the trip to the grocery store.
- Have so many food-safe containers on hand that any leftovers get stored without a second thought. Then your endgame meals get pushed back.
So much good advice there. I have noticed that (esp. when I'm dining alone at home) I can get into the rut where a) I didn't go to the store and then b) order takeout creates an a->b->a vicious circle.
Developing a habit of going to the store (even if you don't feel like it) and getting some of those less-perishable items so you have endgame options is key.
One thing I've found helps is to get really comfortable cooking. First I plan a bit getting a recipe (this is best done @work or on the way back. I stop over at a store. Finally, at home, I pour a small glass of wine/open a beer, turn on music or a podcast (or netflix) and walk through my recipe.
This clearly takes time investment, so it's important to go through the habit so you can 1) be comfortable with it and 2) optimize it for you. Rewarding myself with desirable activities as part of the meal-prep is great. Taking pix and sharing what I made is also fun (even if it's bad - can be a good laugh).
I think the main reasons why so much food is wasted are the same reasons why so much water, petrol and electricity are wasted: all of those have become commodities in endless supply, literally streaming out of a pipe (well, a distribution pipe in the case of food) at the push of a button; and all those things are in fact too cheap (the price for the end user does not reflect the cost of production and of externalities like CO2 emissions, health and environmental damage).
In my analysis, one of the best ways to reduce waste and over-consumption is to stop subsidies for agriculture, water, oil etc, and let prices reflect the real cost. Of course, in a growth-based economy this kind of change would never happen.
But other solutions are also possible, even in the current system. Our family of four is slowly transitioning to sustainable consumption, starting from food and hopefully becoming fully autonomous someday with regards to water and electricity.
One of the changes we've made is buying higher-quality products in smaller quantities, preferably from local sources. Another change is to try and close the waste loop. Any food not eaten by us will go to our dog and cat, and eventually to our chickens, who provide eggs, meat and soil fertiliser. Further optimisation is achieved by using dry toilets - our bodily waste is composted on site, the carbon is sequestered and eventually turns into soil.
I strongly believe that "closing the loop" like that can be practiced on a much larger scale, even on a national scale.
The pricing should penalize over-consumption. Let's say the first 10 gallons of gas per week are taxed at a certain rate, the next 10 gallons a higher rate and so forth.
Think of it as a subsidiary for the poor. Market forces have not been responsive to creating a sustainable planet, while we also have to recognize the necessities for life/production in society. The cost increases at a higher rate for those who go beyond the basic needs.
No. You're starting with the assumption that the completely free market is the best way to achieve our societal objectives around energy production, distribution, and consumption.
I disagree, saying that there are other better models than the completely free market, that still employ free market elements, including tiered and time of use pricing. But that's probably because we believe in different societal objectives on this subject.
The market doesn't care about fairness, though, and we do.
We want everyone to be able to afford enough gas to get around, but if we price it cheaply enough to do that, large consumers are going to use too much and damage the environment.
If we place larger taxes on the fuel to price in the externality of environmental damage, we price poorer people out of the market for gas.
What you are describing is tiered energy pricing. This is already done for natural gas and electricity in many areas. The tiered pricing happens because energy utilities are incentivized via regulation to reduce consumption after a certain point.
No such incentive structure exists for the gasoline market, and absent a true carbon tax, the remaining way to achieve conservation of gasoline is to push forward alternatives to gasoline powered vehicles.
Progressive taxation of income/wealth would seem to have the same effect, but for everything you consume. No need to tax the goods if you can tax the income first.
In my analysis, one of the best ways to reduce waste and over-consumption is to stop subsidies for agriculture, water, oil etc, and let prices reflect the real cost.
This wouldn't help as much as you think. Even without subsidies, those things would still be very cheap, and the subsidies are ultimately paid by all of us anyway in taxes.
It's great that you're voluntarily becoming self-sustainable, but many actions which are great when done voluntarily make for poor public policy. In many areas, it's simply impossible to write a policy that is fair to everyone. Or it could work fairly but it doesn't scale.
Ending agricultural subsidies sounds nice in theory, but what other consequences will it have? I sure wouldn't want to have to tell the low-income part of town "Your food is now twice as expensive, but if you just plan better and don't throw as much away it'll work out the same." Poor people can't afford tupperware! Lack of planning isn't their problem. Being poor is expensive.
I was raised on the concept that we are lucky to have an abundance of food and that there are people going hungry in the world. In my house almost no food goes to waste. I would feel like a scumbag if I was throwing out food.
It sure seems the size of the refrigerator itself is significant: if you have tons of space, you just store more, and it's easy to lose track of.
Basically, a smaller fridge might comes with lifestyle changes, but, also a much smaller cognitive load. If you can't store that much, you don't have to recall when you bought it, or what you still have.
In our house, a lot of food waste is in cooked or par-cooked food, which comes without a label, stored in a container.
I'd be very curious, but I do notice that the US wastes a ridiculous amount of food (~30% I've read in recent articles). We also have the largest refrigerators.
Of course, I seriously doubt you'd ever get any kind of regulation on refrigerator size in the US. But, it would be interesting to see how that compares with label changes. My suspicion is that in the US, the effects from label dates isn't that great. We just have too much stuff.
A large freezer - now that's a lifesaver. Buy in bulk or cook batches and win the game.
But a fridge? Once you go beyond N days of food per person, you're literally wasting food! It's impossible to use the space for the most part other than some condiments.
Restore home economics to school, along with reasonable lunch time and recess.
People think packaged food is more convenient or cheaper. Cooking from scratch isn't more expensive or time consuming. Not knowing how to cook and shop is expensive and time consuming.
Here's a great guideline for "best by" and other dates: if the product has one, don't buy it. I don't think I've bought a product with one in several years.
>Here's a great guideline for "best by" and other dates: if the product has one, don't buy it. I don't think I've bought a product with one in several years.
This doesn't make sense to me unless our locales differ greatly in labelling practices. Virtually everything but fresh produce comes with a date. Even independent butcher shops close the wrapping paper with a date sticker.
I challenged myself to avoid packaged food for a week. It went so well that I continued, in the process learning to cook from scratch.
I was surprised to learn that it took less time, cost less, tasted better, and led me to see packaged food as unnecessary.
I wrote a bunch of posts on it since I felt my ignorance and inexperience kept me from a better life and wanted to make the experience available to others http://joshuaspodek.com/avoiding-food-packaging-2
It's like that joke: saving leftovers makes you feel good twice; once when you put them away, and the next time when you pull them out and realize you dodged a bullet by not eating them.
My wife certainly treats the fridge like 'write only media' at times.
A basic traditional trick to minimize waste is to repurpose yesterday's leftovers into today's entree. Nearly every culture has a version of this, from Asian fried rice to American casserole.
I'm pretty guilty of food waste. In particular fresh produce. But to be honest I'm unrepentant about it.
The health benefits of a diet high in fruits and vegetables are just enormous. I'd much rather over-buy than under-buy. If someone in the household ends up eating junk food because there was no fruit/veggie option, that's a disastrous failure condition. The solution is to make sure that we never run out of fruits and vegetables, which necessarily entails keeping excess inventory that will eventually be thrown out.
Is this financially wasteful? In a very narrow sense, sure. Yet even in just economic terms the health benefits from a diet high in fruits and vegetables overwhelms any grocery bill considerations. At the end of the day produce is much cheaper than insulin.
certain aspects of nutrition are best met with fresh vegetables, and definitely taste desires, but supplementing with frozen fruits and veggies can be just as healthy, reduce waste and let you stock up in-season for later in the year.
It's pretty hard to freeze leafy greens for a nice salad though...
That's an excellent point about freezing. And we certainly do keep the freezer stocked to the brim with frozen options.
Like you alluded to the biggest challenge is the taste factor. Eating veggies over junk food is already enough of an uphill battle willpower wise. Especially with kids in the house. Combined with the inconvenience of dethawing, they're just not that popular.
I wish American super-markets would stock a wider range of fermented vegetables. In terms of long-term preservation, I find fermentation to be more appealing than freezing for most cases. Frozen veggies typically just taste like a flatter version of their fresh counterparts. Whereas fermented veggies have a unique taste that's appealing all on its own.
My partner and bought a CSA share, and the entire food planning for each week is based on that CSA share. Often times, food is prepared on the weekend, and we eat only left overs all week. We also have a small garden outside. Between the two, we have little need to buy anything but proteins, all of which are vegan, and perhaps a few additional food items like bread.
Our food waste and costs have dropped dramatically, but we did have to make a 'sacrifice' of choice. Each week, the food that is produced for consumption in the house is decided not by us, but by what is produced and distributed by the farm. Due to this process, we might have lost choice, but we have gained, surprisingly, variety.
To expand on this idea: I think that the prevalence of choice in our supermarkets (example: fresh fruit in the middle of winter, wtf?) is massively inefficient, and should be reconsidered. Of course, when human society decides to get its collective act together and fight climate change, the point is moot. The entire 'choice regime' is dependent on high density fuels, and energy density will make these choices for us if/when carbon based fuels are made more expensive.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadStudy highlights:
> Institutional signals of food quality drive consumer food waste behaviors.
> Food-related routines affect whether refrigerated food gets eaten.
> Ambiguous date labeling decreases the odds that refrigerated food will be eaten.
> Respondents are systematically over-optimistic that refrigerated food will be eaten.
Honestly this is part of why I throw food out maybe more frequently than others do. The plethora of dates is extremely confusing. Pair that with the fact that I’ve had awful food poisoning a few times in my life and I end up tossing food out that’s probably still fine to eat, but I just don’t want to risk it.
Find the pattern and avoid those situations. There's no need to be wasteful by blindly following those arbitrary dates.
It's usually easy to tell when most food has spoiled by smelling or examining it. Another important aspect is making sure the food is cooked thoroughly.
Buy 100 fresh chickens from the supermarket. Then tell me which ones are contaminated with campylobacter just by smelling them. You can't.
You can't.
All smell tells you is when the food is rotting, but no-one eats rotting food because it smells foul and because it tastes foul.
People get food poisoning because pathogens often are not detectable by smell or taste.
Cook rice. Chill the rice. Store it correctly. Reheat it thoroughly.
Sniff it at every stage.
Can you smell the bacillus cereus, can you smell the toxins they produce? The toxins are not destroyed by heat from cooking, and this is a very common form of food poisoning.
Stop telling people they can smell food poisoning. They can't.
> It disingenuous to ignore the parent's very next sentence,
No, because parent poster is talking about ignoring the "arbitrary" food safety dates. If you ignore the date you significantly increase the risk of food poisoning, and not all of those are fixed by thorough cooking.
For many people food poisoning might be a few days of unpleasant illness, but we need to remember that it can also be a life-changing illness.
Most of what I buy has a 'best before end' (BBE) date, not a 'use by', which is not a 'food safety date'.
Many supermarkets in the UK are removing BBE dates from vegetables because of exactly this issue (and as discussed in the article) - people blindly chucking food that's fine because the date is yesterday's.
You're keeping track of potentially 100+ items, all need storing differently, all go off at different speeds, and you need to predict when you'll need more. You're basically running a shop in your head.
Seen in that light, just as it's not advisable to try and run a business in your head, it shouldn't be advisable to try and run your kitchen the same way.
How do you think the Hawaiian pizza was invented?
Edit: More seriously, a meal plan can help. Check the fridge to see what needs using, write a meal plan based on that, write a shopping list based on the plan. Not onerous when you get used to it.
Buy only from that list.
The only thing that really throws us off is if we end up eating out with friends once or twice and then our "snacking" food runs out faster than our "meal" food. Usually we base our grocery trips on when we run out of milk though, which happens pretty predictably.
I always heard it was the inner city people and the rural people that didn't have grocery stores easy to get to.
We're 30-45 minutes away from the nearest store, let alone grocery store or supermarket. We make 1 trip every 2 weeks to stock up on groceries, and often plan the entire month in advance. We grow and can our own vegetables, because fresh vegetables are too far away and don't store as well long-term.
The push for meal planning, I'm now realizing, is weird to me because we've always done that. That it is a function of the physical space I occupy has never occurred to me.
In 2010, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that 23.5 million Americans live in "food deserts", meaning that they live more than... 10 miles from a supermarket in rural areas.
I always figured it applied more to super-poor city dwellers.
10 miles in a rural area is nothing. Like, I'm 10 miles from the nearest town right now, and that feels pretty close.
But to me - because food deserts have a larger impact on low-income folks, I think about it in their context. If I didn't have access to a reliable form of transportation, 10 miles would be a super long way to have to travel.
I could be 200km from the nearest grocery store, and it'd just mean I need to stockpile a bit more, because as you say, assuming there are roads etc, I can jump in the car whenever and go there.
By contrast someone who's poor and severely disabled might feel they're in a 'desert' if the nearest store is 200m away and they can't walk.
If you lived in one of the smaller villages around here, it would be 50-100km to the store, yeah.
City dweller nonsense about how it's oh-so-inconvenient to wait N minutes extra for food delivery is just funny in this context. Bunch of babies, I tell ya. :P
I suppose if we had like 100 kids then the variances would probably average out and we'd waste far less leftovers. I'll bring that idea up with the spouse.
"Are you sure? That seems like a lot..."
"Yes-- we ate all of it in 2 days last week."
"Well, OK."
...
A week later, 90% of X is still sitting there. I try not to get too upset, because I remember doing the same thing when I was a kid. I'm better at predicting what I will actually eat these days.
In a place like NYC it's a little better because you're limited by how much you can carry. A daily trip to the grocery store/bodega is physically limited and I'd very often get just what my family of three needed.
The right balance is making a very specific meal/snack plan and going once a week (or less frequently if possible) and not going back throughout.
So I waste little of the food in the fridge. Most of my food waste is avocados, which seem to be ripe for about 5 minutes before spoiling.
That, or mashing them up ahead of time and freezing. Avocados freeze very well due to their specific make up.
Changing how I eat greatly reduced my food waste.
Now eating a lot of bulk foods with high soluble fiber. Porridge, beans, lentils, seeds. Instapot for the win. Uncooked (dry) stores very well.
All my excess produce goes into smoothies, also greatly reducing my waste.
That seems like an exaggeration or maybe you're not storing them correctly. What do you buy and how do you store it that won't last several days to a week?
I buy and eat a lot of fruit and my experience agrees with OPs, at least in some cases.
So most of the time, fruits and vegetables keep for days and don't have to be eaten immediately, right?
I'm being not picky because this is a conversation in a thread about how people throw out a lot of food. That waste is due, in part, to false sense of spoilage and OP was furthering that false sense.
Nobody seems to want to fix the mold problem. They blame you, the consumer, for not noticing that the thing you were buying already had mold hidden in the center of the packaging.
The seller has a perverse incentive to keep foods sold by weight or by outward appearance moist. They even spray everything on the refrigerated bins with those stupid misters all the time. Cool, dry air would reduce the weight and generate a desiccated appearance over time.
I don't remember this happening when I was younger. Is it a flaw in my memory, or do fruits show mold faster now?
If your food is molding within two days, I’d guess it’s either your fridge or the grocer. Clean your fridge out with bleach and baking soda semi-regularly. If your house is humid, consider a dehumidifier and try not to leave the fridge door open too long.
Harold McGee replies: Good point to bring up! Bread and other lean baked goods are the exception to the rule that cold storage is good. Bread stales faster at refrigerator temperatures than at room temperature. So if you want to keep a loaf for a couple of days, a breadbox is better than the fridge. For much longer than that, the freezer is the best place.
https://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/harold-mc...
It's mainly used to cut sashimi slices from a fillet without thawing the fish first. It goes in the fridge with bite-sized nigiri-sushi rice wads, and is defrosted by lunch time the next day.
It occasionally gets used to make really thin slices out of slightly stale bread.
But more to the point, good quality bread has been more ingrained in the culture of several (but not all) European countries than in the US, and while the wheels are turning, it seems to take some time.
But also bear in mind that in some places, eg rural France, it might well be a ten minute drive to the baker in the next village. People will still do it daily, or several times a week.
Also the case in the middle east and Asia, though it tends to be flat breads of various kinds. And in some places like India it's more common to just make it yourself.
Another is that you consume significantly less than even a small loaf of bread. I haven't been to a bakery that will sell you individual slices of bread, or even parts of a loaf. Maybe this is different in other countries (I live in the US).
It's also typically much more expensive to buy serving-sized anything.
But frozen bread is not quite same. It has a strange crispiness to it.
> INGREDIENTS: Organic whole wheat (organic whole wheat flour, organic cracked wheat), water, organic dried cane syrup (sugar), organic expeller pressed canola oil, organic wheat gluten, organic molasses, organic cultured whole wheat, sea salt, yeast, organic vinegar.
Is it the vinegar?
Where I live, it's more like 20% relative humidity, and bread with air exchange dries out.
About your situation: I've to admit that I don't know about keeping bread well in such bad conditions. I'd try a slightly more sealed container, or if that doesn't work, slice and freeze it fresh. Other than that, find uses for dry bread (works perfectly fine in soup, or if white bread, make breadcrumbs etc. etc.).
20% rel. humidity is so low that it is very uncomfortable for humans, even unhealthy for some people. Are you really sure that's your in-house humidity? Outside/inside are often very different, due washed clothes drying, cooking, plants, respiration, and also humidity from the cellars in some buildings.
If yes, and if possible, I'd recommend an air humidifier to get that up to 40% or so. Depending on volume, a $60 unit should be able to do this, even if it will take three weeks until the humidity slowly approaches sensible levels.
If you aren't in a hurry, it also thaws pretty well on the counter. About 10 minutes seems to do the trick.
I wish someone had told me all this a long time ago. For the first 35+ years of my adult life buying bread either meant wasting a lot, or eating a lot more sandwiches and toast than I would have liked.
The other frozen thing I wish I'd known about a lot earlier is microwave "steam in bag" frozen vegetables, such as [1]. They are only $0.78 at my local store, which is way cheaper than the canned vegetables I used to buy, taste way better, and are trivial to prepare (stick bag in microwave for 5 minutes, let stand for 1 minute).
[1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Steamable-Mixed-Veget...
As a french person, the idea that you would put bread in the fridge just horrifies me. But then most of the stuff labelled as bread in the US really isn't bread.
A bread machine will make both your bread a million times better, both taste and ingredients-that-are-inside wise.
And the imitation "sandwich" bread that tastes like cardboard and sawdust easily lasts for 3+ weeks regardless of where and how it is stored. Which makes me marvel at what it's made of that it doesn't go bad in a month.
Bread machines are tricky and very messy. They don't produce enough heat to fully cook bread through like it would in a proper commercial oven. At least that was my experience with all the consumer-grade bread machines. YMMV
Here's one BBC article that mentions it: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4DfZMpv7BYJ3kGXdHx...
"Freezing turns starch into resistant starch... this means that your body gets far fewer calories from the bread. In effect, the resistant starch feeds your gut bacteria, rather than feeding you."
edit: App I use is eMeals, I tried several and this is my favorite so far, we are on the Paleo plan right now but they have maybe 8 or 10 different plans and you can switch pretty much at will. If anyone else has one they love please let me know!
That's horribly entitled and now I feel bad.
Same here.
And you get that already for the cheap units.
So, it's a freezer, it freezes, and it doesn't send a post to Facebook. The only complaint I would have is their loudness. Modern extra-slow compressors are often (perceived) louder than previous-gen units.
Also: given that even DIY ovens usually start with "get a cheap PID controller from e-bay", I doubt that commercial ones use anything else.
That said, very few refrigerators out of the large number of available models (many more than say dishwashers or clothes washer/dryers) have the same interior layout.
Even two nearby models from the same manufacturer with minor feature differences will have significantly different layouts, to the point that you can't just choose to get a fridge with or without feature X without also choosing between differences in the likely more important aspect of layout.
- Every time you pull out the bin, you get a reminder about what you have, and what is going bad
- A meal is fairly easily structured by drawing one or more times from each bin
- It's much easier to clean a bin than to clean the whole fridge; you can move the contents into a new bin and clean the old one
- Food stays fresher because it's in airtight containers, and not subject to the horrid dry air of the fridge
- I know roughly how many person-days of food are in a bin —— so I can plan when to go to the store
- It's really easy to know what kind of food to buy more of when you go to the store —— bin closest to empty.
The one gotcha is that some bins can't be out of the fridge for long (e.g. meat), but generally the bins have sufficient thermal mass that 3-5 minutes on the counter inspection and choosing a few ingredients isn't going to cause any spoilage.
or perhaps a software solution can help. Your fridge could recommend you eat certain things which are about to go mouldy.
I learned this when I was about to hack together a chest fridge with a PID controler and the appliance repair shop where I went to get parts gave me the XY problem question. Once I told them what I was doing they just did the thermostat replacement instead in no time.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!
If I were one to build appliances, I would probably start by pumping liquid refrigerant through thermally-conductive shelves, and dispense entirely with blowing the cold air around. Air has almost no thermal mass. Water with a bit of ammonia dissolved in it is probably what is circulating through aluminum tubes.
Put the food to be chilled directly on the cold shelf, and the heat is removed by conduction, rather than convection.
Once we have that squared away, separate the portion of the appliance responsible for removing the heat from the portion responsible for storing the food. Stop selling the ugly awkward insulated cabinet attached the refrigerator. Now you have your standard back end, which does nothing but circulate fluid at a specific temperature through external hoses, and a customizable variety of front ends with standardized refrigeration hose fittings.
I'd want my insulated food storage cabinets to have evacuated double-paned glass windows in them, proximity-activated fluorescent tube lights, be relatively shallow for fridge shelves, and have pegboards on the back wall. I hate having to move front-food around to get to the back-food. It should all be front-food, which means shelves that are wide and not deep. One cannot do this with a monolithic appliance. One can easily do this with modular parts.
The deepest foods I ever want to store are large pizza boxes. Even those don't fill up the entire depth of a typical fridge.
With a few exceptions, like going on vacation, I never throw away meat or fish, it's not that hard to manage, if I don't eat it within 1-3 days, I either freeze it, salt it or boil it. What you can do with what product requires a bit of experience, for example chicken must be boiled, pork and fish can be salted...
It's much harder with vegetables, because they are not all equal, you might keep an egg plant for a month and another one for a week. I highly recommend fridges with a vegetable compartment that monitor humidity and keep temperature just above 0°C, you can keep a salad in good condition for weeks in it.
For milk derived product, I think the date on the product is a big culprit here. You can eat yogurt weeks after the "best by" date. Same for cheese. The good thing is that it's easy to tell if a yogurt or cheese has turned bad. For cheese we don't eat quickly, I use a vacuum pump with a hard container. There are also some little tricks like putting old yogurt in front at the height of the kids.
- Develop a notion of cadence: how much food could you get through in a given interval (3-7 days), and how will this be affected by visitors, eating out, and travel. This might seem obvious but it's not — a lot of people have a "stocking up" mentality — if I buy a lot now, I won't need to go to the store for a while--that leads to suboptimal nutrition, more trips to the store, or eating out more b/c the fridge is empty. Using a standardized interval makes it much easier to learn adjustments.
- Develop an inventory of "endgame" meals that are less perishable that you can always have on hand so you can maintain your cadence. Examples: Halloumi (grilling cheese, good for months), tacos (canned beans; refrigerated tortillas, cheese, peppers and onions are good for weeks), pasta (olive oil and parmesean). Things like charcuterie, esp smoked and jarred meats, and fermented foods were originally invented by peasants to last for a long time and they still have their use, whether you are peasant or not. By contrast, there are "opening" meals like fresh seafood, which really should be eaten on the same day as the trip to the grocery store.
- Have so many food-safe containers on hand that any leftovers get stored without a second thought. Then your endgame meals get pushed back.
Developing a habit of going to the store (even if you don't feel like it) and getting some of those less-perishable items so you have endgame options is key.
One thing I've found helps is to get really comfortable cooking. First I plan a bit getting a recipe (this is best done @work or on the way back. I stop over at a store. Finally, at home, I pour a small glass of wine/open a beer, turn on music or a podcast (or netflix) and walk through my recipe.
This clearly takes time investment, so it's important to go through the habit so you can 1) be comfortable with it and 2) optimize it for you. Rewarding myself with desirable activities as part of the meal-prep is great. Taking pix and sharing what I made is also fun (even if it's bad - can be a good laugh).
In my analysis, one of the best ways to reduce waste and over-consumption is to stop subsidies for agriculture, water, oil etc, and let prices reflect the real cost. Of course, in a growth-based economy this kind of change would never happen.
But other solutions are also possible, even in the current system. Our family of four is slowly transitioning to sustainable consumption, starting from food and hopefully becoming fully autonomous someday with regards to water and electricity.
One of the changes we've made is buying higher-quality products in smaller quantities, preferably from local sources. Another change is to try and close the waste loop. Any food not eaten by us will go to our dog and cat, and eventually to our chickens, who provide eggs, meat and soil fertiliser. Further optimisation is achieved by using dry toilets - our bodily waste is composted on site, the carbon is sequestered and eventually turns into soil.
I strongly believe that "closing the loop" like that can be practiced on a much larger scale, even on a national scale.
Secondly to incentivize less consumption.
I disagree, saying that there are other better models than the completely free market, that still employ free market elements, including tiered and time of use pricing. But that's probably because we believe in different societal objectives on this subject.
We want everyone to be able to afford enough gas to get around, but if we price it cheaply enough to do that, large consumers are going to use too much and damage the environment.
If we place larger taxes on the fuel to price in the externality of environmental damage, we price poorer people out of the market for gas.
No such incentive structure exists for the gasoline market, and absent a true carbon tax, the remaining way to achieve conservation of gasoline is to push forward alternatives to gasoline powered vehicles.
This wouldn't help as much as you think. Even without subsidies, those things would still be very cheap, and the subsidies are ultimately paid by all of us anyway in taxes.
Ending agricultural subsidies sounds nice in theory, but what other consequences will it have? I sure wouldn't want to have to tell the low-income part of town "Your food is now twice as expensive, but if you just plan better and don't throw as much away it'll work out the same." Poor people can't afford tupperware! Lack of planning isn't their problem. Being poor is expensive.
- Wait until the food is 90+% gone before going to the grocery again. On the last day we might eat out once.
- Eat fresh food first, frozen/canned last.
- lots of containers for leftovers, they get gobbled in 24-48 hours.
- Walk to the local market when a few in demand items run out, like bananas, baby spinach, or coconut/almond milk.
Basically, a smaller fridge might comes with lifestyle changes, but, also a much smaller cognitive load. If you can't store that much, you don't have to recall when you bought it, or what you still have.
In our house, a lot of food waste is in cooked or par-cooked food, which comes without a label, stored in a container.
I'd be very curious, but I do notice that the US wastes a ridiculous amount of food (~30% I've read in recent articles). We also have the largest refrigerators.
Of course, I seriously doubt you'd ever get any kind of regulation on refrigerator size in the US. But, it would be interesting to see how that compares with label changes. My suspicion is that in the US, the effects from label dates isn't that great. We just have too much stuff.
A large freezer - now that's a lifesaver. Buy in bulk or cook batches and win the game.
But a fridge? Once you go beyond N days of food per person, you're literally wasting food! It's impossible to use the space for the most part other than some condiments.
Lots of things have long shelf-lives and want cooling. Its not all about leftovers and vegetables.
And even vegetables have their place. We preserve (can/freeze) garden produce. Where to put it between harvest and processing? The fridge.
People think packaged food is more convenient or cheaper. Cooking from scratch isn't more expensive or time consuming. Not knowing how to cook and shop is expensive and time consuming.
Here's a great guideline for "best by" and other dates: if the product has one, don't buy it. I don't think I've bought a product with one in several years.
This doesn't make sense to me unless our locales differ greatly in labelling practices. Virtually everything but fresh produce comes with a date. Even independent butcher shops close the wrapping paper with a date sticker.
I was surprised to learn that it took less time, cost less, tasted better, and led me to see packaged food as unnecessary.
I wrote a bunch of posts on it since I felt my ignorance and inexperience kept me from a better life and wanted to make the experience available to others http://joshuaspodek.com/avoiding-food-packaging-2
My wife certainly treats the fridge like 'write only media' at times.
The health benefits of a diet high in fruits and vegetables are just enormous. I'd much rather over-buy than under-buy. If someone in the household ends up eating junk food because there was no fruit/veggie option, that's a disastrous failure condition. The solution is to make sure that we never run out of fruits and vegetables, which necessarily entails keeping excess inventory that will eventually be thrown out.
Is this financially wasteful? In a very narrow sense, sure. Yet even in just economic terms the health benefits from a diet high in fruits and vegetables overwhelms any grocery bill considerations. At the end of the day produce is much cheaper than insulin.
It's pretty hard to freeze leafy greens for a nice salad though...
Like you alluded to the biggest challenge is the taste factor. Eating veggies over junk food is already enough of an uphill battle willpower wise. Especially with kids in the house. Combined with the inconvenience of dethawing, they're just not that popular.
I wish American super-markets would stock a wider range of fermented vegetables. In terms of long-term preservation, I find fermentation to be more appealing than freezing for most cases. Frozen veggies typically just taste like a flatter version of their fresh counterparts. Whereas fermented veggies have a unique taste that's appealing all on its own.
Our food waste and costs have dropped dramatically, but we did have to make a 'sacrifice' of choice. Each week, the food that is produced for consumption in the house is decided not by us, but by what is produced and distributed by the farm. Due to this process, we might have lost choice, but we have gained, surprisingly, variety.
To expand on this idea: I think that the prevalence of choice in our supermarkets (example: fresh fruit in the middle of winter, wtf?) is massively inefficient, and should be reconsidered. Of course, when human society decides to get its collective act together and fight climate change, the point is moot. The entire 'choice regime' is dependent on high density fuels, and energy density will make these choices for us if/when carbon based fuels are made more expensive.