How to Reduce Food Waste at Home: Resources

In March, I rounded out the mini-workshop series on the topic of waste, culminating on a popular topic that many folks are talking about to their peers (and even in mainstream media): food waste. As we are still navigating pandemic-times, many people have transitioned to working from home, resulting in a shift in habits–growing food at home, trying their hand at raising houseplants, and cooking new recipes in the kitchen or supporting their local businesses through takeout and delivery services.

For this How to Prevent Food Waste at Home workshop, I invited two NYC locals, food waste prevention extraordinaire Cait Enz of Hops and Brains, and our city’s favorite four-legged passionate grassroots composting pug Astoria Pug (represented by Lou Reyes) to the conversation. These two individuals presented a wealth of information about how they prevent food waste in their households, and I was also equally as impressed and inspired by our engaged participants who shared the many ways they divert food waste in their kitchens, too!

Throughout the presentation, we presented participants with stats and resources that they could come away and utilize in their efforts to prevent and reduce food waste at home. I’ve shared many of the data sources, additional learning material, and resources that participants have included throughout the presentation for your convenience. If there are other helpful materials that should be added, please feel free to reach out and make your recommendations!

Read (Resources from the Presentation)

• USDA Food Waste FAQs
• Feeding America Hunger in America stats
• ReFED’s A Roadmap to Reduce US Food Waste by 20 Percent
• NRDC’s Wasted: How America is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill
• FoodPrint The Problem of Food Waste
• UN Sustainable Development Goals
• UN Environment ThinkEatSave SDG 12.3 Food waste index
• MIT Study: For food-waste recycling, policy is key
• EPA Sustainable Management of Food
• Discard Studies San Francisco’s Famous 80% Waste Diversion Rate
• The City of Burlington Managing Food Scraps in BTV

Listen

• Yale Climate Communications audio Food Waste is a Global Problem
• Unwasted podcast
• Good Influence with Gemma Styles podcast episode Max La Manna on Food Waste

Do

• Help schools improve their recycling and waste sorting stations with a SORT2SAVE Kit and organizing Plastic Free Lunch Days
• For retailers: Climate Collaborative food waste resources
• For New Yorkers: Get involved with Astoria Pug if you’re local to NYC by signing up for their newsletter (you’ll learn food waste prevention tips from Cait of Hops and Brains here, too!)
• For New Yorkers: participate in composting and find an organics / food scraps drop-off in your neighborhood
• For New Yorkers: get involved to #saveourcompost by following the coalition on Instagram and Twitter
• For New Yorkers: if you live in an underserviced neighborhood that doesn’t have a food scrap drop-off site yet (and know a site that wants to host), fill out this form; Queens Botanical Garden is definitely looking for interested parties!
• For US and world residents: find an organics / food scraps drop-off site with MakeSoil or ShareWaste

Explore

• Use the FoodKeeper App to optimize freshness and quality of your food items
• Visit the ReFED Insights Engine to identify food waste solutions tailored to each stakeholder and reader

Know of a resource that might be helpful to someone looking on this page? Have a recommendation for a future workshop topic? Feel free to post it in the comments below, send me an email, or direct message me on Instagram.