Wastin' Away in Grocerybasketville

Miss MoneyPenny is pretty sure that Jimmy Buffett was singing about something other than food waste when he sang that good old song back in the seventies, but if he ever gets unwasted down there in the Keys, he would probably be shocked, as I am, by our careless waste of food dollars.

The famous MoneyPenny Research Department has come up with some pretty scary facts.  It is estimated that the average U.S. household wastes between 30 and 60 percent of the food that we haul home.  Here are a couple of shocking but interesting graphs:

I read somewhere about a group of people that was curious just how much of their food budget that they were throwing away, so they came up with the idea to put post-it notes on everything that they brought home that was perishable.  They labeled everything from apples, radishes, yogurt...well, you get the idea, with how much it cost.  So if you bought a bunch of radishes for $1.20 and there were 12 radishes in that bunch, they were 10 cents a piece.  If three of them ended up going blackish like they do and you threw them out, or composted them, that is 30 cents.  If the sour cream gets that pinkish moldy stuff halfway through ( have you noticed that the shower curtain can sometimes get that pink stuff too?  Ick!!) that would be 80 cents and so on.  If you put this money aside until the end of the month, you might find that you had wasted a week's worth of grocery money or even more!!

This also counts for leftovers.  What an unfortunate name for something that is already cooked and waiting for you to heat up and eat. That is a gift from the fridge god and more than likely tastes even better the second time around.  If you have a bunch of those little containers that you carefully saved while cleaning up after dinner, try using them in soup, omelets, pasta or pizza.  Everything tastes good on pizza - even broccoli.

It snowed today and I took a picture of my garden, which is safely tucked away, waiting for Spring.