Even food-waste experts know the gap between the meals we imagine and the food we actually eat. Shelie Miller, who studies sustainability at the University of Michigan, understands how an acorn squash can end up in your cart without a plan. “It’s fall. I’m feeling the fall vibes,” she says, describing the temptation. That’s why she and her husband try to stick to a shared grocery list—and know what they’ll do with what they buy.
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“I always call it a garbage potato, or maybe it’s better to call it a kitchen-sink potato,” she says. The toppings change often enough to keep things interesting: “My husband always plays a guessing game of what my potato is going to be this week.”
Stir-fries can serve a similar purpose. But Miller knows where her loyalties lie: “My go-to is a potato.”
Give broccoli stems a chance
Deutsch, a professor in the department of food and hospitality management and founding director of the Drexel Food Lab, cooks both parts at home. The night before we spoke, he made broccoli salad with tahini and chili crisp. The stem was woody on the outside, so he peeled it, cut up the tender interior, and then air-fried it along with the florets.
“The same care and love that went into the florets,” he says, “went three inches lower into the stem.”
Miller and her husband try to answer that before they start cooking. Cabbage rolls might take care of some; soup or a roasted side dish can use the rest. The same thinking applies to the tomato paste left in a can or the extra chicken breast in a package. “Getting comfortable with all the different ways you can prepare different ingredients really helps extend the menu,” she says.
“Instead of generating more waste that you have to deal with, you’re taking surplus food,” he says, “and you’re making it into new things that you want to eat.”
Put your apples in the fridge
“I’m an apple kind of person,” says Roe, a professor of agricultural, environmental, and development economics at Ohio State University who leads its Food Waste Collaborative.
Miller knows what can happen to food you freeze with the best intentions: “It just goes into the abyss of a freezer.”
She and her husband now make a point of shopping in their freezer before deciding what to buy or cook. Sometimes, that means discovering they already have lunches covered for the week. Other times, it means remembering the portions of tomato paste they froze after a recipe called for only a spoonful.
Their approach: “We’ll eat a day or two of leftovers. We’ll freeze the rest.” Then, when they need lunches another week, they can pull out a meal they haven’t just eaten three days running.
File your soup
Once frozen, the thin packages stack neatly, taking up less space than bulky containers. Use bags intended for freezing, leave room for liquid to expand, and follow safe cooling, storage, and reheating practices.
“Stock is like magic,” he says. When people wonder why their soup doesn’t taste as good as their favorite restaurant’s, he points to what might be missing: stock, along with generous seasoning. He also uses it in place of water when cooking rice, polenta, or vegetables to give them extra flavor.
Make leftovers worth looking forward to
Roe’s air fryer helps him get another meal out of restaurant leftovers. Recently, he used it to reheat half a tuna steak and vegetables his wife had brought home. “That makes things kind of tasty and crispy again,” he says.
Sometimes, that means turning last night’s teriyaki chicken into today’s salad. His adult son has found another opening for leftovers: breakfast. “They’re the freshest they’ll ever be because it’s the first meal after,” Roe says.
He’s experimented with AI to find ways to use ingredients on hand, and recommends giving it more than a list of what’s in the fridge. Tell it how much time you have, what equipment you’re using, and how comfortable you are in the kitchen.
Buy portions that match your appetite
Throwing away part of a chicken breast means wasting more than dinner. It also wastes the resources used to raise and feed the chicken. Animal products generally have a larger environmental footprint than plant foods, Miller explains, which makes keeping meat, eggs, and dairy from going uneaten especially consequential.
Miller and her husband still eat meat, but they’ve started serving smaller portions. “Meat is an accent to the meal,” she says. They’re trying to avoid a familiar outcome: “We both have two huge chicken breasts and waste a quarter of them.”
When they’re having people over, Roe tries to calculate what guests will actually eat, while his spouse comes from a tradition of making sure there’s enough to “feed the army.”
Don’t make plastic-free the only goal
Miller studies the environmental impact of plastic packaging. She also has a freezer full of soup in zip-top bags. “Very honestly, we go through a lot of single-use plastic,” she says.
Miller uses reusable containers for lunches and tries to minimize disposable items. But she considers what the packaging helps her accomplish. “A good zip-top bag is really hard to compete with for certain applications,” she says.
“My big philosophy is not to sweat the small stuff,” she says.
Compost what you can’t use—but try to eat it first
“A lot of folks think, well, hey, I’m composting, so it’s OK to waste food,” she says. Composting can’t recover all the resources used to produce food that never gets eaten, so she focuses first on using what’s in her kitchen—whether it becomes lunch, soup, or next week’s potato.
When food does go uneaten, “throw it in the compost rather than the trash if you have that option available,” she says.
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