If you want to maintain a steady budget, meal prepping can be your best friend. You can clip coupons, grow your own vegetables and buy in bulk all you want, but if you don’t have a plan for where that food is going and how you’re going to space it out, you can really waste a lot of food.
I did a quick search on Google, and multiple references average that in the US, between 20-25% of the food that we buy never gets eaten.
That’s a lot of food that goes into the trash!!
Here’s one article from Food Shift.net and another from saynotofoodwaste.org.
Both of these articles show that hundreds of pounds of food is being tossed every year. You know what though, I believe I’m guilty of it. I think I regularly do some of the top offenses.
How I Waste Food- Are You Guilty of These?
- Not saving everything I make properly: I often make large meals, enough to feed about 10 people. I always have high hopes of not having to cook for the rest of the week and everyone being happy with the same selection. WRONG! It usually ends up with me trying to eat the same meal for breakfast, lunch and dinner for 4 days straight, or having to freeze the remainder. Typically, I forget to freeze it in time and I end up throwing away the leftovers that I couldn’t get to.
- Not eating everything at restaurants: Sometimes I’m not going home immediately or I just don’t want to eat the leftovers.
- Not checking before I go to the store: If I’m out already and I run to the grocery store, I don’t remember everything that’s in the fridge or pantry. Even when I go straight from home to the store, I don’t always remember to check for what supplies we already have. So we end up with multiples of the same product, and not everything has a long fridge/shelf life. The one we’re most guilty of in our home is yogurt, for some reason I always think we need more than we do.
- Buying ingredients but not needing the entire amount: It is so easy to find recipes online. Some of them call for an item or 2 that we don’t normally use for cooking, but is essential to that particular dish. Isn’t that when the thing you need is in a jumbo sized can or only calls for 3/4 of a tube of tomato paste, etc… If I don’t remember that thing is in the fridge, it may sit on the top shelf for weeks before I remember it. By then its spoiled, or I’m not sure if it is, so I throw it away.
- Making a dish but not eating the whole thing: Have you ever made a sandwich or bowl of spaghetti and felt full halfway through it. What do you do with the rest? If it’s a reheated dish, I typically throw it in the trash.
What habits do you have that waste food? This leads to the next question. What can you do to change it?
How to Change Those Habits- And Save Money Doing It
This is the part I was excited to implement, and I have to say, my budget (and my neighbors chickens!) has never been happier.
The Number One Thing I did was to start meal prepping. Currently I do this for myself and my husband but not for the kids. Mainly because they are in love with nuts, cheese, hot boiled eggs and cereal right now, so they basically feed themselves. But when their palates get a little more sophisticated, they’ll be on the food prep train too.
Once we could narrow down what meals were healthy, we wanted to eat, and were easy to cook in bulk; we made our shopping list. I raided the pantry for items and took note of what we still needed to buy to make the dishes. This way we eliminated double inventory and had a plan for the things we were purchasing.
**This also allowed me to go to my local grocery stores online shopping site and see what current deals or coupons were available. If you need more info on how to use online shopping to maximize your coupons and stay on budget, check out this article.**
Like with anything else in life, once you focus your attention on it, you start to see the results. When you know how much money is going out of your wallet toward groceries, you begin to see the different ways you can save and how to reduce the amount you waste. Those wasted scraps begin to look like money, and you wouldn’t throw away cash, would you?
Initially, we did have to spend a little bit to save a lot more later. We needed storage containers!!!
Which Meal Prep Containers Are Right for You?
There are hundreds of different containers out there. So which one will work for you?
Are you clumsy? Do you need to reheat your food? Will you be taking soups/chili/something else liquid? Are you going to freeze items? How often will you be prepping? Will it be for you or the kids, if for the kids, do they drop their lunchboxes a lot? Do you prefer plastic or glass?
We went through 2 batches of plastic containers before we settled on the glass ones we have now.
The first batch were substandard quality and a few of them broke in the washing machine. We didn’t even get to use them, but they were so cheap we weren’t too upset by it, just annoyed at having to buy more. The second round was better, but we dropped most of them or smashed them because we’re clumsy (as a family we’re all clumsy).
This is what we got.
I like the compartments and the size.
The third round are glass and they have been around a few years now and are still perfect. So glass works for us the most.
We used these.
I got different colors for each member of the family to keep it simple.
The few remaining plastic ones from the second round are being used by the kids in the school lunchboxes. The school doesn’t allow glass containers, so it worked out perfectly. We also got a few good ones to use after these inevitably break as well.
I looked around town for glass containers and the best deals I could find for our needs were located at TJ Maxx and Target (but only because they were on clearance).
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