Here are some tips on how you can stop wasting food

Beard Foundation wants to teach you better habits.

As with the impacts of climate change and poor dietary habits, the effects of food waste are not felt right away. You may notice the amount of leftovers and spoiled produce that you toss into the trash every week, but you don’t see the mountains of waste rotting in landfills, generating billions of metric tons of greenhouse gases and wasting the Earth’s freshwater resources.

The James Beard Foundation, under new chief executive Clare Reichenbach, wants to use its national platform to raise awareness and help professional chefs and home cooks alike combat a complex production, supply and consumer problem that annually results in the waste of about one-third of all the food grown in the world. As part of its new multi-year campaign, the foundation has released a new cookbook, “Waste Not,” featuring tips and chef-driven recipes that use whole vegetables or scraps. It has also launched a weekly promotion, Waste Not Wednesday, to encourage consumers to learn how to better manage their household food.

“We want to build a movement around this,” Reichenbach said in a phone interview. Theoretically, the foundation notes, if Americans eliminated food waste one day a week for an entire year, the effort would save 7.8 million tons of food - enough to provide 13 billion meals for the hungry. But even if all Americans don’t step up for the cause - particularly millennials, the generation least confident in its kitchen skills - chef, restaurateur and activist Tom Colicchio says raising awareness will be enough. For now.

“I think people just need to understand how much they’re wasting,” Colicchio said in a phone interview. “It’s like putting the frog in the cold water and turning up the heat. You don’t see the waste. You don’t see the amount of food that goes into the garbage, but it amounts to about $1,500 to $1,800 per person per year.”

Colicchio, who resigned from the Food Policy Action group that he co-founded, knows there is waste all along the food chain, from farms to supermarkets to restaurants to households. Colicchio is also assisting a group to help reduce supermarket waste by turning it into fertilizer and animal feed.

“The individual person, they can each play a little part, and that will definitely reduce food waste,” Colicchio says. “But if you can get some big movers here, I think that will really put a dent in waste.”