There was a time when I loved leftovers. Reliving the previous nights meal. Having something tasty for lunch at work while the girl next to me has a plain salada. Or that last slice of pizza the next morning on a weekend. No matter how they came, leftovers were a gift from the food gods, reward for a bountiful harvest.
Now they only give off the rotten stench of failure. Four days straight of coleslaw after too much cabbage being purchased. Too much cooked pasta becomes a toastie, whose ingredients in turn become a pasta dish.
Then there is the stir fry. The last refuge of leftover vegetables. How many times can we make a stir fry before one of us snaps and does something with the soy sauce or carrot we’ll regret.
But really, none of this is really leftovers, merely overs. We bought too much and must pay for it or suffer through it. Spinach was my first attempt to buy less, but no matter how much I tried, there was always too much. It was used in scrambled eggs, pasta salad, too many lunch bagels to count, not to mention the dreaded stir fry. Now, I just don’t buy spinach.
Carrots are almost on the no buy list as well. We’ve seen too many carrots go limp and almost break in half when the time came to peel them. Why did I buy three? I only needed one for the recipe, but I guess I thought they were cheap and I’d make a salad for lunch. Potatoes are a particularly evil piece of food overs. Those eyes staring at you from a dark corner of the cupboard. The longer you ignore them, the more eyes that end up staring at you.
I guess I never truly appreciated how much hard work and sustained effort it was going to take to get to zero food waste. Learning new recipes, finding alternatives to 1 kilogram minimums, resisting the temptation of in season fruit and veg, I never considered any of these when we started. I thought it would be easy, buy less, eat less, done. But here we are, surrounded by week old capsicum, half a lemon and some thyme who’s original purpose is from, well, another time!
But we are having some small wins changing our shopping habit. Buying half loaves of bread and smaller cartons of milk. Although if the milk gets any smaller, we’ll be buying from hotel suppliers! And in the meantime, hopefully all these small wins will keep us going in the bigger challenge towards zero food waste.