Food Waste Friday | Plus Kitchen Canny

Every week, I post a picture of the food that has gone bad over the last seven days. Why do I do this? Because in March of 2008, I finally got fed up with the amount of food I was wasting, and I thought that showing my waste to other people would motivate me to use up my food instead of wasting it. Because this often embarrassing practice was so helpful for me, I invited other bloggers to join me in posting their food waste photos, and Food Waste Friday was born.

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First, zee food waste:

This avocado was one of those that looked lovely on the outside but was fairly disgusting inside. Boo.

And inside that container is a bit of leftover chicken. I started to eat it, but it had a bit of an odd taste to it, and I didn’t want to risk eating any more of it.

Second, Kitchen Canny:

Kitchen Canny is a UK organization dedicated to helping people reduce their food waste.

The UK is doing such a great job of addressing this issue in a very public way with their Love Food, Hate Waste campaign, so I’m not at all surprised that Kitchen Canny is in the UK.

(note to America: Let’s get with the program here!)

Kitchen Canny’s goal is help educate people about how to reduce food waste in their homes, and to that end, they sell kits with information and tools to fight food waste.

The kit contains a booklet with a step-by-step weekly program to help you identify causes of waste and prevent them in the future.

If you’ve been faithfully reading my blog for years, some of it will sound familiar to you!

Also included are several bags for measuring your food waste during the first few weeks of the program.

And there’s a magnetized list you can stick on your fridge, which can help you keep track of what’s in your fridge and what you need to buy (a proper shopping list helps you buy only what you need.)

That’s probably my favorite feature of the kit, actually! And as you can see, my children have been having some fun with it…they’ve written all sorts of odd things on there like dinosaur teeth, engine oil, and the like. 😉

Now, since this kit consists mostly of information, there’s not a lot in it that you couldn’t get for free on the internet. But if you live in the UK (they do ship to other countries but it’s a bit more expensive) and are having trouble tackling the food waste problems in your house, this kit might be helpful to you.

And if it helps you trim your food waste, it could pay for itself in pretty short order, considering that the average person throws away their weight in food each year.

That’s a lot of money that’s hitting the trash can (or the bin, as the Kitchen Canny kit would say!) The kit costs £10, which is probably a lot less than you’re spending on trashed food each year.

Note: Kitchen Canny sent me a kit but did not otherwise compensate me. I’m blogging about them because I’m delighted to support a company with an anti-food waste mission!

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How did you do this week? If you blogged about your food waste, link us up by entering your info into the widget below. You’ll save money, reduce your trash output, and get a little publicity for your blog! And if you don’t blog, you can still share about your food waste by leaving a comment.

Those of you who participate in Food Waste Friday can now grab a fancy-schmancy button to perk up your posts. If you copy and paste the following code into your Food Waste Friday post, this little graphic will appear.

If you blog on WordPress, just make sure you’re in html mode when you copy and paste the code, or it won’t work properly.