5 Easy Tips To Fight Food Waste: Millennial Edition (It’s As Easy As Tapping your Phone)
Guest post by: Jean Ong, founder of Ecolover United
Fighting climate change is as easy as eating well and as convenient as having a kitchen manager run your kitchen for FREE. Fighting global warming means winning over food waste. And for millennials, winning over food waste means eating like a gourmand WHILE saving money, and hiring a kitchen manager for FREE.
Food waste is a huge problem, it emits a huge amount of global warming greenhouse gases. If food waste were a country it would be the 3rd biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, after USA and China. So just by eating our food and not throwing it away, we’re already creating a big impact on global warming.
Winning against food waste is as convenient as using your phone. Fighting food waste? There’s an app for that.
Download these free apps that run your kitchen for you. Heck, they even create meal plans for you.
When you have a fully stocked pantry, who could blame you if you overlook some of its contents right? There’s bound to be food that gets lost in there. And who keeps track of expiry dates anyway? Or what about that half-used sesame oil for when you went on your Chinese food cooking phase?
All these become food waste when they go bad before we use them up. But, tech savvy people now use apps to help in the kitchen. Apps like Kitchen Pal, SuperCook or Fridgify does all the work to eliminate waste in the kitchen. It’s like hiring a kitchen manager that runs our entire kitchen. It keeps food from expiring, plans our meals for us, creates a virtual “eat me first” bin, prevents food from getting lost in the pantry, and makes grocery shopping easy.
The apps organize the pantry so we know what’s in there. It also zeroes in on keeping pantry food from going past the expiry date, it suggests recipes based on what’s in the pantry and recipes that will use up the expiring food in the pantry, and it comes with a function to create a shopping list. The shopping list feature is a Godsend, it’s like having a personal assistant for your grocery shopping. This feature is a powerful secret weapon that prevents food waste before the food even gets into your pantry. No more buying two of the same pasta sauce since you prepped a list beforehand.
I personally, love the KitchenPal app. It’s brilliant how it does the meal planning for me. It makes it a no-brainer as the app shows me what I can whip up with what I already have.
Below are the links where you can download the apps.
- KitchenPal or for Iphone
Hire a chef to rescue your leftover meals for FREE.
When your fridge is filled with leftovers what do you do? Search for an app that can rescue those leftovers and turn it into a quick meal. There are many apps out there, but the best one for breathing new life to leftovers is hands down Big Oven.
Using this app is like having 100+ chefs present you with ideas for a creative spin on your boring leftover meals. It’s so easy you just have to specify the type of leftover you have on hand and it will show you hundreds of recipes.
Using up leftovers prevents it from becoming food waste. But the best part about working with leftovers? It saves you time and money. Cooking with leftovers is much faster than creating something from scratch.
Below is the link where you can download the apps.
Get FREE food while rescuing them from becoming food waste. Get the Olio app.
Your neighbour, the one you never talked to since you first moved in apparently bought too many tomatoes. What does he do? He gives it away for FREE so it won’t go to waste. He uses a sharing app that lets the average person get the food they want for FREE! It’s a network of donors who give away their surplus food to people who want that food. He uses Olio app.
How does it work? It’s location based, so all you have to do is sign up. And the home page will show what food is being given away near you. The donor and the recipient will both agree on the specifics like time of pick-up, place and other considerations.
Olio’s goal is to make it easy for people to share food, thereby winning the fight against food waste. This app tracks and shows you how much food you’ve rescued and how big an impact you’ve made.
Below are the link where you can download the apps:
Eat like a gourmand WHILE saving money. Download apps that rescue restaurant food from going to the landfill
Restaurants throw out perfectly delicious food at the end of each day when they go unsold. And they throw out a lot on a daily basis. So imagine if you can change the world just by eating. You can save the planet by doing something as effortless as enjoying a good meal. Apps like Karma, ResQ, Ywaste, Too Good To Go aims to empower the average person to help the restaurants, cafes and supermarket fight food waste while also saving money on food.
These apps show the available surplus food for the day and its discounted prices. It lists the surplus food of the partner restaurants, cafes and supermarket. To make everything seamless, you can easily make the purchase while inside the app. And then you just pick up the food.
To add to the feel good factor of saving the world, they also track how much savings you’ve made and how much food you’ve rescued.
Karma app takes it a step further by making saving the world fun. It gamified the whole experience to appeal to the millennial and digital natives who are used to playing games on their phone.
Below are the links where you can download the apps.
- YWaste or for Iphone
- Too Good To Go or for Iphone
Give Away your Kitchen Scraps. Use the Sharewaste app
Not all food waste comes from food that’s gone bad. Another secret source of waste comes from the fruit and vegetable peels we throw away. These food scraps aren’t edible, but they’re not exactly waste either. They are the building blocks of a healthy soil.
So either subscribe to a composting service that picks up your scraps at your home or use the Sharewaste app to take those food scraps and create healthy soil thru composting. The app is like a Tinder for donors of kitchen scraps and people who want it.
How does it work? It’s location based, so you have to sign up, either as a donor of kitchen scraps or as a composting host (recipient). If you signed up as a composting host, the home page will show the list of donors near you and vice versa. The donor and the recipient will both agree on the specifics like time of pick-up, place and other considerations and voila! Kitchen scraps get diverted from landfills to create a healthy garden soil.
Below is the link where you can download the app:
ShareWaste or for Iphone
Bonus Tip to Fight Food waste:
When hosting parties and barbecues, be a classy host and send your guest home with goodies.
When hosting parties or barbeques, everyone over prepares with food. And those leftovers usually get thrown in back of the ref until they get forgotten and end up in the trash bin.
What a shame, because with those leftovers you can become the classiest host ever. As you’re wrapping up the party, send your guests home with a “party souvenir” grown up-edition. Simply pack a kit of leftovers for each guest to bring home. Say; one container of the main dish, one container of the dessert, one container of the siding. Believe me, your guests would be so happy to bring home next-day’s meal so they don’t have to cook.
In my social circle, it’s common practice to send each guest home with the entire full course meal but in smaller portions.
You save delicious food from going to waste while at the same time saving your guests from having to cook tomorrow’s meal (which everyone appreciates). That’s classy!
The truth is, you can effortlessly reduce food waste just by using apps.
- A kitchen manager app to run your kitchen for you and avoid foodwaste.
- An app to create meals out of your leftovers.
- Olio app to score free food while rescuing it from the landfill.
- Apps that rescues restaurant food
- Sharewaste app so you can donate your foodscraps to a neighbour that wants them
For the millenial Earth Hero, this is what fighting climate change looks like. Doing good while eating good. All done easily at the tap of a button.
