Tuesday, October 31, 2023

In My Kitchen, October 2023

Obviously in my kitchen in October is Halloween candy!

For more than half the month of October, we were out of town and eating mainly in restaurants, so not much has happened in my kitchen lately. Therefore this wrap-up will be short. I'm sharing my kitchen thoughts with the many other bloggers who summarize new foods and gadgets each month and link up at Sherry's Blog.

New from Trader Joe's: a nice French snack.
I had it waiting in the freezer for when we arrived home after a day in the car.

Brought back from our visit to Fairfax where there's a Wegman's.

On every trip, I get some new magnets and retire the previous batch from my refrigerator door.
These are from Monticello, Cape May, the National Zoo in Washington, and the Baltimore museum.
Also, Alice brought me a Daruma magnet from her trip to Japan. (I wish I had been there too!)

We've been eating simple meals, often made from pantry staples. For example, for this lunch, we had
sardines (from a can), sliced cheese, lettuce, olives, and stuffed grape leaves (another Trader Joe item).

Simple classic: roast chicken, bread dressing, cranberry sauce.

Len’s latest bread, with raisins and dried cherries.

Food Waste


In my kitchen is a new trash can. The old one was broken, so we had to get another one for household trash that can't be recycled or composted. Very unexciting, but it reminds me of an issue that’s getting a lot of attention these days: FOOD WASTE.

Potential mulch.
From start to finish, we are told, there is unnecessary waste at every step of the food chain. The wasted food represents an unproductive expenditure of energy. Piles of rotting garbage then produce methane and other by-products, and thus accelerate global warming. One household doesn’t make much garbage, but there are millions of us!
"According to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), approximately 31% of the available food supply is wasted, with 21% occurring in households and 10% in consumer-facing businesses....About 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions are linked to food loss and waste." (source)

Here in Ann Arbor, compostable household garbage is collected with the garden waste (like raked-up leaves) and is turned into usable compost. Nationally, around 27% of the US population has access to a program for composting food waste. (source)


A few big actions lead people to waste food in their own kitchens. Homes with children have many challenges with wasted food for a lot of reasons. In particular, if parents follow general advice on having children try new foods several times, waste is inevitable. Adult families create waste when we over-supply our refrigerators and pantries with food we don’t need or don’t manage to use. Whether the unused food goes to landfill or to composting facilities, it's still wasted.

What are people doing that results in so much waste?
  • Buying too much at the grocery store, especially produce, and then not using it in a timely way. You get a good deal: 20 pounds of potatoes and 10 pounds of onions at Costco. What happens to them?
  • Cooking a big quantity and not using the leftovers. Trying a new food and not liking it. Or just overfilling your plate: especially an issue at restaurants. Abundance is our enemy in fighting waste.
  • Purchasing unusual ingredients when planning to cook a complicated recipe and it doesn't happen — so you never need the materials. Or buying a big package/bottle/box of an exotic Asian sauce or special condiment that you only use once and throwing it away a year later.
  • Over-reacting to “sell by” and “best by” dates on packaged and processed foods. These labels encourage people to throw away still-usable food. We are now told that other than deli meats and a few other things, most foods are still fit to eat (if they don’t smell bad) for quite a while after the date on the package. I partly believe this, and try to make responsible trade-offs between eating something that might be too old, and tossing something that might be fine.
  • And just a seasonal note: in my experience, any leftover Halloween candy should be thrown out just before Valentine's Day. (For a more nuanced view on candy shelf-life see eater.com.)
Maybe you grew up hearing that you should clean your plate because there were starving children elsewhere in the world. (The exact spot where these children lived varied throughout the 20th century.) Maybe your mother or teacher said these hypothetical children would be thrilled if they were offered what you were rejecting. I have no idea if this ever made any difference in any child’s behavior.

Starving children are unfortunately still with us now, but I think we adults in the 21st century can find more useful motives for trying to be more responsible. If we want to combat global or local food insecurity, there are better ways than cleaning our plates!

Maybe it’s too late to undo global warming, or too depressing to think about it very much. No doubt though: global warming is clearly leading to crop failures and to starvation in Africa and other parts of the world. Overwhelming, isn’t it?



Neighborhood Update: Decorations at Night





Happy Halloween, Everyone!

Blog post © 2023 mae sander


18 comments:

  1. Great post. Food waste is something I try very hard to avoid for all of the reasons you listed. Love the night time Halloween pictures.

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  2. Happy Halloween! Hubby and I love to shop at our Wegmans here in Hunt Valley Md. Love the Halloween decorations. The flatbread snack from Trader Joe's looks yummy. I like your new magnet collection. The bread looks delicious.
    Take care, have a great day!

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  3. Too funny, I bought a new trash bin as well. Very nice step pedal and silent close, for all the stuff that cannot be composted. Composting is the way around here, and so good for the garden. Your "simple" meals all look delicious.

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  4. I like Wegman’s! I wish we had a good food store nearby. Every few weeks I drive 45 minutes or so to get to Wegmans or Whole Foods in Northern Virginia. And now there’s a Sprouts in Manassas. It’s a nice store, although small compared to Wegmans.

    I don’t think I waste a lot of food, but it’s difficult when you live alone. Well, at least I have my dog but he’s kind of picky.

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  5. I recently threw over $350.00 of canned food away. One can of soup was from 1994. I kept everything from 2018 to now. Everything I've opened so far was good. I don't eat a lot of canned goods, but now I design meals around them. I bought that same bag of candy last year amd only had five children ring my doorbell. Thanks for this thought provoking post.

    BTW, I want to buy one of those machines that turns garbage and other disposable waste into compost, but right now I have better things to spend nearly $500.00 on.

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  6. The tarte sounds and looks very yummy!
    Food waste is bad, I agree. Luckily we have a compost bin right in front of the house. And try to not waste. Though, being only two people it sometimes is very difficult.
    Supermarkets here often have huge portions it´s frustrating. Buy that or buy super-expensive. So, take tilsit-cheese for example, I love it. But 500g-packages?!
    Crazy world....
    Love all the deco!

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  7. Mae,
    Your post has brought attention to a crucial matter of food waste. I think the idea of buying less makes sense especially for those of us who are retired and might tend to eat out a little more. In the condo we don't get trick or treaters so thus no candy. However, with all the Halloween candy being 1/2 price today, I was tempted to keep a large bag in the house for "company" . Then I realized hubby and I would be chipping it away each night and my company might never see it. I put it back on the shelf after walking around the store with it for 10 minutes. Love all the night decorations. So fun !

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  8. Love the idea of a pantry salad - it looks so good! How good are your neighbourhood decorations?! And thanks for the food for thought about the food waste. I must look into composting!

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  9. Did you have many trick-or-treaters? We bought the candy but no one showed here in the country. Oh well. Now we're stuck with it. So much for health. Your neighborhood seems very festive.

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  10. such a fun post Mae. Love the Halloween decorations. Can't believe another one has flown by already. those mushroom tarts look enticing. And I love dark choc pecans. The Darumu fridge magnet is so cute! Yes it's hard sometimes not to have food waste but I try! have a great november. cheers S.

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  11. Len’s latest bread looks so good, and I can imagine a slice or two slathered in butter! In The Netherlands food waste is collected free of charge, and only landfill waste is charged for. Hopefully people do not use this as an excuse to just throw food away! I buy what we need, and rarely look at use by dates. I try and minimise what gets thrown out by making good use of leftovers and ingredients I buy. We do encourage Hannah to try new foods - but just one bite, and she knows she doesn't have to eat it. Or clean her plate for that matter. She needs positive associations with food imo :)

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  12. I'm betting you had tons of trick or treaters in your neighborhood, despite the weather, given the fun decorations that abound. Oh, it's very cool at night -- I think worth the drive to A2 next year just to see the decorations! That onion tart looks great -- I'm going to have to remember that when we go to the kids later this month and bring my cooler!

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  13. Thanks for posting the information on food waste, it's really a huge concern in today's world. I used to volunteer for Ozharvest (a food waste rescue organisation) back home and I was always blown away by the amount of food we would rescue from supermarkets, a lot of in totally edible condition but was just slightly wilted or wrongly sized, or even simply discontinued for packaged foods. Thanks for the Halloween spirit too!

    love, dreams of sourdough http://ayearindarwin.blogspot.com

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  14. My grandma encouraged me long ago to keep a compost pile where it was easily accessible, and that is one small thing I do.

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  15. Super spooky! My son and d-i-l love Halloween and their home is a mass of Halloween decorations at this time of the year.

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  16. Food waste is such a big issue worldwide. We try to limit how much we throw out by having a meal plan for the week and shopping from a list. I was quite shocked with the food waste that we saw in restaurants while we were on holidays. We watched people order starters, mains and dessert and then just not eat much of any of it before leaving because the portion sizes were so big. I didn't quite understanding why people ordered so much in the first place.

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  17. You are right to draw attention to food waste in this profligate society we inhabit. We took this issue seriously many years ago and have literally reduced waste to almost zero. It’s well within the reach of everyone to do so, with minimal effort or radical lifestyle change.

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  18. I barely bought any Halloween candy this year. We just don't get the hoards anymore and if it's around, I'll just eat it. I would love some of those delicious mushroomy things though. I've really tried to be cautious about food waste, especially when it comes to our bi-weekly farm bags. I try to cook up as many vegetables as I can when it comes and freeze what we don't use. Have a thankful November!

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