Fresh Food

Why should we take better care of our food?

According to the USDA, Americans waste 30-40% of their food supply. In other words, this is around 130 billion pounds and $161 billion of wasted food every year. That’s a lot of lost money, and a lot of lost produce that could have fed thousands of starving people.

Here at Responsible Consumer, we’re well equipped to give you helpful tips and tricks to keep your groceries fresh, so that you don’t waste food or your money!

Fruits & Veggies

Everyone knows you need at least 5 servings a day of fruit and vegetables. If your produce is going bad within a couple days, you’re going to be spending a lot of time and money at the store. Below are a few useful hints:

Don’t wash the produce all at once--wait until you want it, and then rinse off only the amount you will eat. Otherwise wet produce leaves room for bacteria to grow.

If you want to wash them all at once, rinse berries or fruit with 10 parts water and 1 part vinegar. This will also help fight off mold.

Squirt apples and avocados with lemon juice.

Wrap onions in pantyhose! This allows the right amount of air to reach them without them going bad.

Store apples and potatoes together. The ethylene produced by apples helps keep potatoes fresh. However, don’t mix apples with anything else!

Store tomatoes outside of the refrigerator.

Unwrap celery from its store packaging and put it in tin foil instead.

While ethylene gas helps keep potatoes fresh, they do the opposite for bananas. Wrap the stem of each banana in plastic wrap or paper to give them a few extra days of ripeness.

Dairy

All dairy products should be kept cold, though how you store them depends on what kind of food it is. Check out the list below to see how you can keep mold off your cheese and milk:

Soft cheeses: place in an airtight container.

Hard cheeses: wrap in plastic wrap and store in a baggie.

Butter: Can remain in the fridge for three months, or frozen.

Sliced cheese: Remove from the deli packaging and place in an airtight tupperware container. Do not keep in fridge for more than a week. (Packaged sliced cheese can remain refrigerated for up to a month).

Milk: Keep in the fridge for no more than a week, but another option is to freeze it for up to 3 months. The same applies to soy milk, however do not freeze.

Yogurt: Can be refrigerated for up to two weeks, or placed in the freezer.

Whipped cream: Keep the can in the fridge for a month, and 2 weeks if it is a non dairy tub (i.e. Cool Whip).

Cream: Keep light cream cold for 10 days, and heavy cream for a month.

Meat Products

While you may not feel too good by accidentally eating spoiled produce or dairy, expired meat can be extremely dangerous if consumed. Most meat does not have an incredibly long life in the fridge, so read the list below to make sure yours is not overdue:

Deli/Lunch meat: Unopened packages are okay for 2 weeks, but opened packages should be consumed within 3-5 days. When you get meat from the deli, take it out of its original plastic packaging and transfer it into a tupperware. Otherwise the plastic may sink into the meat, making it relatively unsafe to eat.

Bacon & Sausage: Bacon can be left in the fridge door for a week, but sausage must be eaten either the day you buy it or the day after.

Ground Meat (i.e. Hamburger): Similar to sausage, this must be eaten the day of or the next day.

Poultry: Again, 1-2 days is the max amount of time this should remain in the fridge.

Note: for cooked poultry, beef, or pork, it can be left in the fridge for 3-5 days. The above points refer only to raw meat.

Storage: Plastic Containers

Most people don’t know there can be a huge, and vital, difference in your household plastic containers. These are ideal over plastic bag packaging, because they are reusable, hold more food, reduce your non-renewable plastic use, and (mostly) do not contain harmful chemicals.

The basic rule of thumb when picking out which storage containers is to look at the number located on the bottom, with a small triangle around it. Numbers 1, 2, 4, and 5 are the ones you should be looking for, and you should avoid 3, 6, and 7. These can contain vinyl or polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polystyrene, or Bisphenol-A (BPA).

Do not microwave food in tupperware containers, and keep them cold by storing them in the refrigerator.

Visuals

The images below, brought to you by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, are perfect visual ways to learn how to store your food properly so it stays fresh longer.

Check out the “How to Keep Produce Fresh” and “Food Storage Infographic” to see how and where you should put all of your groceries!

How to Keep Produce Fresh Longer - Infographic