Reduce waste with easy tips for a more mindful kitchen
I’m a plastic addict. I fill gallon-size zip-top freezer bags with tomato sauce bound for the freezer and snack-size bags with cashews bound for my purse. I stretch plastic wrap over a Key lime pie I plan to nibble on later. My husband, meanwhile, seems to pull off several feet of aluminum foil just to wrap a sliver of lime. I find these treasures littering the back of the refrigerator, looking like crumpled silver cat toys, and wonder why it was necessary to enshroud this bite of food instead of just, you know, eating it. I have also stumbled upon plastic sandwich bags filled with some slimy remnant I had tucked into the vegetable crisper months earlier, a bit of onion or half a blood orange I had meant to use.
I recently decided I’d had enough — and probably the planet had too. According to marine research organization Algalita, Americans throw out 185 pounds of plastic per person each year, and National Geographic reported in 2017 that just 9 percent of all plastic worldwide is recycled.
The truth is, both plastic bags and aluminum foil can be recycled (but only if you live somewhere that offers recycling for those specific products), and they can biodegrade in landfills (although that could take anywhere from 50 to hundreds of years). According to a study published last year in the journal Science Advances, about 60 percent of all plastic that has been produced since the 1950s is sitting in landfills around the world, noting that “none of the mass-produced plastics biodegrade in a meaningful way.”
While I try to wash and reuse plastic bags as much as I can, the obvious solution was to figure out how to reduce our dependence on plastic and aluminum. That led me to also look for an alternative to single-use paper towels along with ways to keep produce fresh longer, so as to reduce food waste.
It turns out, it’s not as hard as I thought, but reducing wasn’t the only answer. I also needed to rethink how we shopped for, cooked and stored our food. I call it our “mindful kitchen.” (I honestly can’t remember the last time I used a plastic zip-top bag, although I did find half a tomato swathed in a yard of foil the other day. Words were spoken.)
Here are some ways you can create a more environmentally friendly kitchen too:
Buying in bulk can lead to unintentional food waste. Instead of planning a week’s worth of family meals as I used to, I now shop for groceries almost every day.
Bee’s Wrap, Abeego and Etee are reusable food wraps primarily made of fabric coated in beeswax. Once you get used to using them, they work really well, and can be washed in cold water (hot water would melt the wax).
Food Huggers are disks of food-grade silicone that simply slip over the cut ends of lemons, onions, apples, salami and so forth to prevent them from drying out — an eminently practical solution to food storage, and there’s even an avocadoshaped version. For storing greens and herbs, Vejibags are organic cotton bags that you dampen slightly, then fill with produce to store in the crisper drawers of the refrigerator; just dampen the bag again whenever it starts to dry out, and the leafy goods inside will stay fresh for weeks. FreshPaper is infused with spices (fenugreek is one of the active ingredients) that naturally retard bacterial growth. Simply tuck a sheet into a container of fresh berries or a bag of spinach — or a couple straight into the crisper drawer — and the life of your fresh produce can be extended up to a couple of weeks or even longer.