Week 9 Recap: Food Waste

I’ll admit, I did not give this week’s challenge my best effort. It was a combination of work stress, holiday stress, being sick, and having so many things on my never-ending to-do list that some days, it’s hard to even know where to start.

But you know what else is hard? Trying to reduce your carbon footprint, or go zero waste, or whatever you want to call it, takes so much more effort than the life that many of us are accustomed to living. It’s a lot easier to throw everything in the garbage than it is to sort it all out into compost, curbside recycling, store-back recycling and TerraCycle. It’s a lot easier to buy food that comes in packaging, recyclable or otherwise. It’s a lot easier to eat meat than to avoid it. And on and on and on.

But back to the topic at hand, I did pay attention to food waste this week. I did not designate a shelf in the fridge, but I did clean it out and tossed the old stuff, so I at least know what’s in there now. I brought my orange peels home from work to compost. And when I didn’t finish my dinner, my husband finished it for me … that counts, right? 🙂

I was also on the same page as last week’s Climate Fwd email, which cited reducing food waste as the third most important thing we can do, right above eating a plant-based diet (which my husband and I are also doing full-time now). Another goal I had was to stop bringing Lean Cuisines to work for lunch, so I did not buy any this weekend, will use up the ones I have in the freezer, then be done with them. There’s always plenty of fresh food in our fridge that I can and should bring instead (plus, I just learned I can’t recycle the boxes they come in despite the packaging saying that you can, boo).

So it wasn’t a perfect week, but I did make some changes I can stick to and build upon over time. And until doing the right thing becomes the easy thing, I’ll continue to do the hard thing. Because there is no other choice.