My family’s six tips for reducing food waste

Katie Hackett, World Vision Canada writer and mother of 2, shares her family’s six tips for reducing food waste in the midst of a surging global hunger crisis.

I look down at the purple plastic container in my hands. My shoulders tense. The anger is already rising.  

 Again. 

 Strawberries that were firm and juicy this morning have dwindled into a red sludge in the corner of my daughter’s lunch box. 

 “Why didn’t you eat these?” I ask her with an exasperation that is weeks, months long. 

 “They’re slimy!” 

 “They weren’t this morning,” I say pointedly. And then: “In this family, we do not throw away food.” 

 Darling, slippery, unrepentant girl is already on the run, but the “Can I have a treat?” that she throws with a wink over her shoulder is too much for me.  

 The lecture I aim at her is wholly unoriginal, refined by a generation of parents that went before me, at least. “You know there are children dying—really, dying—because they don’t have enough food to eat?” 

 It goes on longer. I’m not proud of myself. I’m not changing any hearts this way. 

With a sigh, I turn back to my laptop in the final hour of my workday. My cursor blinks halfway down a 3,000-word article on the current global hunger crisis. Tears of grief and frustration well in my eyes, where they’ve been hovering all day.  

 It’s hard to reconcile such disparate realities. 

 On my screen, I’m reading the words of Zoenabo, a mom of six in Burkina Faso. She took her kids and fled the unimaginable when armed groups attacked her village, killing and burning granaries, and decimating their food supply. “We took nothing, not even a cup,” Zoenabo says of their escape, and details unfamiliar ways she’s now trying to source food. When she adds, “Life here, as a displaced person, is not easy,” her words feel restrained. 

Needless food waste amidst a global hunger crisis 

 World hunger is not a new problem, but in recent years, it’s increased at an unprecedented rate—the result of multiple converging factors including conflicts and insecurity, economic shocks and stressors, and weather extremes brought on by climate change. 

 According to the UN, 17 per cent of the world’s total food production is wasted in households, retail, and the food service industry. That’s on top of the 13 per cent of food lost before it ever makes it to the grocery store. (In Canada, the numbers look worse: research by Second Harvest indicates nearly 60 per cent of food produced for Canadians—35.5 million tonnes—is lost or wasted every year.) 

 Knowing that a third of the world’s food is wasted while approximately nine million people (including over three million children) die from hunger-related causes every year feels like the epitome of injustice.  

 The UN has designated September 29 as the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste to draw problem-solving attention to this critical injustice.

Six habits my family is using to keep our food waste low 

My kids know the party line on food waste. And we’re working on raising them to be people who understand the importance of their choices, and how those choices affect others. In my prouder moments, our conversations are thoughtful and age-appropriate. I reach for empathy and responsibility, not guilt. But sometimes, two of my main roles in life—as a writer for World Vision Canada, and as the mother of two young kids whose food whims change biweekly—collide in ways that are tricky to navigate.

While I work on nuanced approaches to family conversations about food, poverty and global responsibility, my family has a few practices that are helping to minimize the amount of food that gets tossed in our home.

Here are six habits we’ve picked up over the years that help keep our food waste low. 

1. We commit to a weekly meal plan. 

This, for me, makes the biggest difference. Not only does meal planning reduce food waste, it helps keep my family on budget, avoids decision fatigue at the grocery store, and eliminates annoying last-minute trips. I admit it—sitting down to make a meal plan every Sunday is a pain, but I never regret it. We pre-plan three or four main dinners per week, aiming for recipes that yield leftovers, and solicit ideas (read: buy-in) from the kids as well. Many apps and influencers offer help with this, but a pen and a weekly calendar work just fine for me. 

2. We make smoothies out of produce when it’s past its prime. 

Rejected lunch box fruit, spotted bananas and languishing berries all get popped into the freezer in our home. When the stash is big enough, we make smoothies and homemade popsicles. Somehow, the kids never complain about those. 😉  

3. We buy salad greens that can also be cooked or blended. 

There’s nothing worse than watching your well-intentioned spring mix slide into the compost after it went slimy and rejected in the back of the fridge. If I have any doubt about my ability to commit to salad, I buy sturdy leafy greens like spinach and kale that can be used in multiple ways—fresh, sauteed, or blended into smoothies.  

4. We experiment with apps that help reduce food waste. 

There are multiple anti-food-waste apps available for Canadians. These allow you to buy still-good surplus food, imperfect food or food that’s nearing expiry at reduced prices, keeping it out of landfills. FlashFood has worked well for my family, but other options exist—like Olio, which helps you pass food you aren’t using to your neighbours, like when you’re trying to empty out the fridge before you travel. 

5. We grow our own food. 

Along with many other benefits, planting a backyard garden has allowed us to offset grocery costs and reduce trips to the store during the summer months. When we grow our own produce, we appreciate it more and are intentional to use it creatively and to share the abundance (hello, zucchini season!). A full garden doesn’t fit everyone’s lifestyle, but even a potted herb on the windowsill or a balcony tomato plant will make a difference.  

6.  We compost as much as possible. 

I feel like I’m redeeming our food scraps by composting them and enriching the soil in our yard and garden beds. No yard? At least make sure you’re participating in your municipal composting program rather than sending food in bags to the landfill, where it contributes to more methane emissions than any other landfilled materials. 

Other ways to combat hunger and support global food security

Reducing food waste is an important action we should all be taking to support global food security, but there are many others. 

 Some of these include: 

Staying informed by reading about the state of hunger and nutrition around the world.

Giving to a local food bank. With record numbers of people in Canada now relying on food assistance, our food banks are struggling to keep up.

Joining World Vision’s global hunger response as we support children and families in urgent need. 
Signing the pledge for our ENOUGH campaign to bring political attention to the global injustice of child hunger.

I’m proud to work for World Vision Canada—especially because of our strong track record in food assistance. I know the work we do is cost-effective, widescale and life-saving. Through our programs in partnership with the World Food Programme, a child or adult receives food assistance every second, and nearly 10 people’s lives are saved every day.   