(This voiceover is an audio version of the newsletter below. It’s unedited, and today you’ll hear me make changes to the post on the fly! If you like/need to listen to these posts I hope you enjoy it regardless!)
I love growing food. We’ve got a ramshackle veggie garden in our front yard that produces handfuls of tomatoes and zucchini and beans every summer, and, depending on the year, maybe some broad beans and spinach and leeks in the cooler months.
When we sit down for a dinner that includes something I’ve grown, I’ll invariably say something like, ‘Do you like the lettuce? It’s from the garden!’ and my family will nod and smile and tell me it’s nice.
When I come inside with a bowl full of stuff I’ve grown, I am a pioneer. A garden warrior. A legend in my own lunch time. Just ask me.
The reality is a little different, of course. I’m hardly living a life of self-sustainability. If we were forced to exist on what I manage to grow, we’d go hungry very quickly and get sick of green beans even sooner.
While I’m proud of every tomato, every carrot, every salad made of homegrown veggies, I think the biggest takeaway from gardening is what it’s taught me about the value of the food we eat.
I know how long it takes for broccoli to grow. I know that an apple takes six months of care before its ready to eat — watching it emerge as a late winter flower, nursing it through the spring winds, keeping the birds away over summer (or if you’re me this year, not keeping the birds away and not having any apples as a result) and checking in daily to see if it is ready to pick come autumn.
And knowing that, knowing how much work goes into our food, I find it harder to waste. I find myself wanting to honour it more. Also:
food costs money and wasting money sucks (Australian households on average waste about $1000 worth of food a year)
it’s not only the food that gets wasted but the efforts of the grower, the transport and packaging required, the electricity to keep it cold or fresh
at the risk of sounding like everyone’s mum in the 90s (“Think of the starving children! Eat your broccoli!”) fresh food is precious, a privilege that shouldn’t be taken for granted
food waste is one of the biggest drivers of climate change (if it was a country, it would be the third biggest greenhouse gas emitter after China and the US)
And before I go any further, I want to say that I don’t blame our growers and farmers for any of this. They are often grossly underpaid for their crops, so they need to produce as much as they can for as little as they can. Supermarkets demand perfection. Consumers want to buy peaches in winter and pumpkins in spring. So growers plant monocultures, they spray, they use cold storage, they do what they need to in order to make a living. I don’t hold them responsible. (Are there farmers doing it differently? Absolutely. Would I like to see more farmers doing it? Absolutely. But for that to happen, the system needs to change.)
So in a continuation of the practical posts I’m writing this month, I decided to pull together some tips on how we can reduce our food waste. Read on!
Start with the fresh food we buy
We might not be able to change the system on our own, but we can speak in a language that big supermarkets understand: money. That is, what we choose to spend ours on, and where.
Learn what’s in season and start to transition to only buying those things, even if it’s annoying. The bonus being that in-season fruit and veg is almost always cheaper and tastier. The Guardian Australia does a really helpful monthly guide on what fruit and veg is in season
Buy domestically or locally grown produce where possible. And if your supermarket doesn’t offer that information, ask. Send an email or visit their contact page
Buy when produce is freshest and cheapest, and learn how to freeze it to extend the season. Foods like zucchini, beans, corn, bananas, berries, pumpkin, peas, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots and greens such as spinach, kale and silverbeet can all be frozen and used in different ways. Here is a good summary of how to freeze them at their best but I tend to just search for ‘Can I freeze xx’ and see what the internet tells me.
Try your hand at preserving foods, by pickling, fermenting, making jam, dehydrating or canning. Aside from the occasional jam or marmalade, I’m not much of a preserver, but there are some excellent guides online including the legends at Milkwood
Find a local farm that does veggie boxes (if you happen to live in the southern highlands, Moonacres does one, and so does Justin at Duckfoot Farm)
Seek out local farmers’ markets and check out who grows near you, what they grow and how you can support them. It’s not always possible to buy this way — finances, access, seasonal availability all get in the way — but even replacing one staple with a locally grown version is a positive change worth making
Learn how best to store fresh food to minimise spoilage and maximise the amount of time you can keep it. This post is a good starting point, but I feel like their estimations for how long fruit and veg will keep seem pretty short
Don’t fear the blemishes! A soft spot or bruise or slug-chewed leaf or wonky shape don’t mean the whole thing is destined for the bin — cut bruises out and learn how to utilise produce that might be too soft to eat fresh but still good for cooking.
Then honour it, by not wasting it
Meal planning and batch cooking (I have a post coming on this in a couple of weeks) help to minimise waste, as does having a few recipes up your sleeve to use the floppy, soggy, bottom of the fridge drawer veggies every couple of weeks. You can also:
Have a ‘Cook from the pantry’ week every couple of months. Challenge yourself to buy as little as possible while using up the random bits and pieces in your pantry, fridge and freezer. It’s amazing what you can make with a tin of crushed tomatoes, some pasta, veggies and maybe some cashews. (I’ve mentioned this cashew cream before but it makes a basic veggie pasta something else entirely.)
Look through your fridge when planning your next couple of meals and check to see what needs to be eaten, what you already have on hand, and what you can substitute.
Learn about salvaging foods that are close to their use-by date. For example, milk that’s just about to turn can be frozen and used for buttermilk. Just add a splash of apple cider vinegar and freeze. On a related note, you can also make a jumbo batch of buttermilk pancake batter and freeze it in jars to use at a later date.
Embrace leftovers, either for lunches or for a leftover night each week (Thursdays for us). It’s a meal that doesn’t need to be planned or cooked and it reduces waste. Win-win.
Have a few staples on hand — rice, pasta, garlic, onion, eggs, cheese, tinned tomatoes, curry paste, pesto, shredded coconut (to make your own coconut milk), veggie stock, sesame oil, tamari — so you can throw together a quick meal with whatever you have on-hand at the end of the week. Omlettes, stir-fry, bottom of the fridge curry, that sort of thing…
Cook/eat/use the skin on your fruit and veggies – the skin of sweet potatoes, pumpkin, carrots, potatoes, kiwi fruit and citrus are all edible and often higher in concentration of vitamins and minerals than the inside. You can roast them, zest them or just eat them fresh.
Keep a container in the freezer for all the veggie scraps that would otherwise be thrown away. Carrot tops, celery leaves, onion skin, mushroom stalks, peelings and discards — as long as they’re clean — can be frozen and turned into homemade veggie stock. Chuck the frozen scraps into a large pot of water along with some pepper, a big handful of salt, bay leaves, maybe some herbs and a parmesan rind if you have one (they freeze well too), and simmer for a few hours. Strain, freeze in jars and pull out any time you need stock.
Compost what you can (or look into community composting options, balcony worm farms or getting a bokashi bin for your kitchen) so that the food that has been painstakingly grown by farmers is returned to the soil once it’s been used
Look for other ways to honour food
Simply paying attention to what we’re eating can shift our relationship with food, transforming it from something mindless to something more.
Take a few seconds before digging into a meal to think about who grew it, raised it or prepared it. Was it a farmer? A baker? Yourself? A loved one? That person put time and effort into what you’re about to eat. Find a moment of gratitude for it. You’ll be far less likely to eat mindlessly or waste it.
Eat away from screens so you can pay more attention to what you’re eating, what’s happening around you and the people you’re with
Take a minute to pay attention to the food as you’re eating it — how it feels in your mouth, the different smells, textures and flavours. Fifteen seconds to savour it can change the way you view a meal completely
Try growing a few things yourself if you have space/time/access/capacity. Herbs like parsley, chives and basil can grow on a sunny windowsill. Gardener extraordinaire, Casey Lister, says that carrots are excellent to grow in a large pot full of potting mix. Silverbeet can grow in a shady corner in a pot or a garden bed, and small broccoli varieties grow well in pots, with the sprouting types producing for months.
There will be gaps in what we can do, and that’s okay. There’s no way I could do all the things I’ve listed above, all the time. Or, let’s be honest, even some of the time.
Making a shift to how we buy, store, prepare and think about food will take time and effort that we might not always have. So instead of feeling like we need to do it all, right now, maybe there’s a single change listed above that feels sustainable to you. What might happen if you commit to that change and see where it takes you?
I’m learning more and more how knowledgeable and resourceful this beautiful community is, so now I’d love to know your best food-honouring tips. Feel free to share it in the comments below.
Plus, if you think you know someone who would enjoy this post, feel free to share it with them too.
Or, if you’re new here and would like to join The Tortoise community, either as a free subscriber or paid, please do. We’d love to have you!
I’m Currently…
Looking out at the most beautiful blue late-autumn sky.
Listening to the new Lovejoy EP Wake up & it’s over. Our 14 year old has excellent taste in music and I’m loving all the bands I’m discovering through her
Thinking about dinner. Spicy bean fajitas (topped with my favourite cashew cream obvs)
Realising I have to go cook said dinner
Feeling a real sense of momentum with my writing and creating at the moment, but also feeling anxious about trying not to do too much. It’s my default, and I’m still learning how to manage my own expectations of myself.
Any way, that’s it for another week.
A quick reminder that Week 2 of our Rhythms Retreat hits inboxes this Sunday, May 28. To join us, you can upgrade your membership below, for AU$5/month or AU$50/year, which gives you access to my quarterly workshops as well as several additional posts per month.
And if you’re reading this after those dates, you can upgrade and get instant access to the retreat, plus the full archives of The Tortoise.
I hope you have a wonderful rest of the week, and I’ll catch you soon.
Brooke xx
Thanks for the Lovejoy recommendation. They are great and remind me of Franz Ferdinand and Artic Monkeys. It's great to share music with my kids, I took them to a gig a while ago, it was the best night!
Thank you. Great reminders! (Also my teen introduced me to Lovejoy during her Minecraft Dream SMP era!)