How I Save Food and Minimize Waste

28 Nov, 2025

Americans love wasting food. You can take away our racism, our love for guns and murder, our car addiction, our love of dictators, and our sense of superiority, but you will never take away our rotting bag of spinach that’s been in our fridge for months that we forgot about and promised ourselves we’d definitely eat but knew deep down that we’d end up in this exact situation.

Look, I’m not one to throw stones. Buying food, and throwing it in a closet or pantry and forgetting about it is so easy to do because it’s so cheap (relatively speaking) and readily available. I’ve never had to worry about when the next meal is coming or what I was going to eat in a given day, week, or month. They say the first step is recognizing that you have a problem, and I’ve climbed that mountain after years of not even realizing it was there.

So how am I getting better at not wasting food? There are a few ways. The first is that I buy more canned food. Canned food is never as good as fresh in my opinion, with the exception of tomatoes, but its rarely ever inedible. Canned tuna is pretty bad, and canned potatoes are just weird. But canned foods lasts for ages. Get a can of baked beans, some tomatoes, some lima beans, and it doesn’t matter when you get to it because it’ll stay good.

I don’t get rid of bean juice, either, or aquafaba as its also known. I remember when I was a kid my mom always drained the liquid from canned beans, and then even washed them in water. I have no idea why she did that (she still does). Aquafaba can be used as a substitute for egg whites (though I’ve never used it for this) or can be used in making stocks.

Which brings me to the next thing I do, and my favorite – stocks! No one can touch these diamond hands or whatever. Anytime I eat meat with bones in it, I save the bones. I buy chicken thighs with skin and bones on them, trim them when I got home, keeping the bones and skin for stock. I save the bones from chicken wings, pork and beef ribs, hammocks, and any particularly fatty bacon I save for stock too. I wish I could use banana, but I’ve been told they have no bones.

Yes, for all my sins I still eat meat. Fairly regularly, too. Almost everyday. Like I said, I’m not perfect.

I do the same with vegetables. Potato skins, onion skins, tops and tails of carrots, apple skins even. Any scraps from vegetables can go in, and you never really know what its going to taste like because you’re always using different trimmings. I would caution against too many onion skins though, they can make it too bitter.

And when you have your meat and/or vegetable stock you can make all kinds of stuff. Being a weeb, I make a lot of ramen with it. You can also use it to make sauces, you can cook use meat stock to make fondant potatoes, you can cook rice with it, various soups and stews, and of course you can grab a straw and blow bubbles in it and call yourself Bubbly Johnson.

If anything looks too bad to go in your stock, you can save scraps and bones and throw them in your garden as compost.

Once your bread gets stale, you can use it to make breadcrumbs. You can also do this with the ends of the loaf if you don’t like eating that part on its own. If you get one of those “I can’t believe it’s not bread!” loaves, those don’t really get stale before they go bad, so you can toast it in the oven to get it crispy and throw it in a blender or food processor.

Look up recipes for leftovers. You make too much rice for dinner? Idiot. But you can fridge it and make egg fried rice the next day. You can use leftover chicken soup as a basis for a casserole. You can blend up leftover veggies into a soup. Meat can make great sandwiches, of course. Turn that leftover grilled salmon into fish tacos. Put that ground extra burger patty on top of your ice cream and wonder what you’ve done with your life that led you to this point.

The best way to keep food from going bad is to have the right storage solutions. Air is the enemy, you want to choke the shit out of your food. Just kidding. In this context the correct term is ‘strangle.’ Airtight containers are great for this. You can get one of those vacuum things, and I do have one, but I never use it because its kind of a pain. Plus it requires plastic bags which ain’t great themselves. Just good good containers that’ll last and put food in there. Flour, salt, sugar, pasta, rice, cheese, butter.

I found the best way to not waste food is to go to the source. Go to the grocery store with a plan of what dishes you’re going to make that week. I like to plan stuff I know will make good leftover dishes, to both save money and save the food. Have a list of what you want and don’t deviate from it. I don’t care if you think you might need that soy sauce, if its not on your list, don’t grab it. Put that frozen orange chicken down, when do you think you’re going to eat it? Pantry staples are also good, because a lot of it lasts forever like rice, dry beans, pasta, flour. They’re all so versatile, too.

And what’s so great about this effort to save food is that it’s also a pretty healthy way of eating. I’m not on a diet (you can attest to that if you’ve seen any of my videos), but I have lost some weight since I started doing all this. Or at least, I’m not gaining it so fast.

There are other ways to save in the kitchen. Those plastic bags cereal come in are great for a whole bunch of things. When I’m done with the cereal, I wash them out, and I can easily get three to five uses out of them. I try to reuse aluminum, if it didn’t come into contact with the food or whatever it was covering. Here’s a great tip a lot of people overlook: when you use a counter-top appliance, but a little bowl underneath the electrical socket to catch the excess electricity so you can use it again later. I like to sprinkle a little over top my ice cream.

There are a bunch of ways to reuse food, of finding ways to prepare food before it goes bad. But in a developed country like the US, it is something to keep in mind. Do you really need to buy that? How can I get the most out of this ingredient? Will I eat all of this, or should I get a smaller pack? It’s not going to make you a saint, this is something we should have all been doing forever, but it will make you feel good. Yeah, I was struggling to write a good end to this one.