We also try and eat down our fridge / cupboard supplied as often as possible.. and try to only do a shop every fortnight.
At the moment my freezer is almost empty, except for a loaf of bread and a bag of frozen berries!! Yet we still have enough in the fridge /cupboards to get through until Sunday.. its amazing what you can make with what you have when you really have a think about it!
A few website that I have found useful are 120dollarsfoodchallenge (Australian recipe blog on how to spend 120 a fornight for 14 meals), Love food hate waste (UK site but useful information), and taste.
I think our fridge is a 210 or 240ltr (from my days living on my own) and its is OK for our family of three for now.. Sometimes it gets a bit full, but usually its fine. I cant see the point of a bigger one at this stage.
I just had a look, it's looking very bare. I shop on a Thursday
We have a 300l fridge only and also same in Freezer (we stock it with meat from the Vic Market every 6wks or so).
I just made our dinner tonight from things only from my pantry and fridge..worked a treat.
I shop using a list..couldn't do without one. I have my list up on the fridge and put things on it as I run out. I only shop once a week for Fruit n Veg.
I also buy bread in bulk and freeze it as we go through heaps.
My pantry is reasonably full, not too bad though, it's mostly the staples. I always panic about running out of things like tinned tomatoes and buy 1 or 2 every week then I have 12tins so I sto buying them, then all of the sudden I go to the pantry to get one for whatever I am cooking and there is none
Right now I am rationing toilet paper, down to our last squares until I do my grocery shopping tomorrow
Being out of town we have to have a deep freeze. Our fridge is 443lt with the freezer on top but we really need a bigger one so we can get rid of the 'beer fridge', which is a small 120lt fridge that DH keeps his beer in, but it is handy at peak times when we need the extra fridge space, so we are hoping that a larger fridge will make a difference. The deep freezer is 320lt. Ideally I'd love an electrolux 520lt - it has a 5 star energy rating in the old scale plus they are still made in Australia at Orange, which is important to me to be able to buy locally made products.
I fall down when I buy fruit and veggies - I'm always mindful of having a rainbow-coloured selection of F&V, and i have an upright fridge instead of an upside-downey (oh I dream of an upside-downey) so there's often something that gets left mouldering at the back. It's pretty small though, but I always feel quite liberated when the shelves empty up.
ALSO - I find when I'm in control of menu choices & cooking dinner, a lot less of the fresh gets wasted...DH however has some kind of fridge-blindness going on. In fact he has very poor fridge-mojo, shoves all sorts of things into inaccessible and illogical spaces.
We have a FP upside down fridge. It's pretty big but has a 5 star energy rating. We also have a chest freezer and 2 smaller fridges we have accumulated - but these are only plugged in when needed.
I love our fridge. The crispers are just fantastic. The shelves are at eye level and there are enough shelves that little hands can't reach.
We keep stuff we use regularly (grated cheese, frozen veges etc) in the fridge freezer and individual dinners that have been frozen for lunches etc.
In the chest is all our meat, bread and icecream (so the kids can't get at it).
I am pantry anal too. Everything has a container (and a label ) so it is stored properly. I have baskets in the pantry that are categorised according to what they are used for, and all the extra stuff is in rows. I know exactly what's in there, where to lay my hand on it and what I need to buy at a glance.
We eat our fridge out of stuff every Friday or Saturday, then market shop on Saturday (and often come home and knock something together with anything left from the week before)
Our pantry is LOADED but it's loaded with staples, like four kinds of rice, a few packets of pasta, noodles, beans, legumes, flours, sugars, seeds and nuts (as vegans our seed and nut turnover is high) There's always crackers, too, so we can throw together nibblies at short notice. We have a large range of classic sauces for cooking from scratch, and they get replaced as they're finished. Always cans of tomatoes, coconut cream, curry paste, beetroot etc. We try to use as little canned stuff as possible because the food miles are horrendous, and it's expensive.
Our freezer contains ice cream, frozen bread, peas, spinach, icy poles and vegie schnitzels.
Fridge has an extra margarine, always. Vegan cheese, cream cheese, tofu, tempeh, vegie sausages. These all get replaced on the next big shop after we've used them, which can be 2-3 weeks. There's also about 6 blocks of chocolate, we just buy heaps when it's on special, and the abundance mentality stops us from eating it. Most of the time!
Our fridge is small - it's a 230L. We struggle to fit stuff in if we're preparing for a party or a barbecue, or if we've had a really big cook up with big leftovers, but generally we're OK.
Like you, Bath, we only buy what we can carry - usually on a bike. But we don't go daily. Weekly or twice weekly.
We bake our own bread as we need it, so we never chuck any out. If there's any that's about to go, it gets ripped into crouton sizes and frozen. Then we just spray it with oil, bake for 10 minutes and use with salads or soups. Easy.
I lived in a very poor developing country as a teenager and have carried incredible waste guilt ever since, so we very rarely throw anything out. The bin guys have actually been known to come onto our property to get our bin; they were worried that we'd forgotten to put it out 6 weeks in a row, only to fin it had a single bin bag in it.
I think the most valuable thing to take from that article is just what the waste equates to, especially in terms of methane production from rotting food gas emissions as well as the amount of resources that go into production. Luckily for us our dog is a living waste disposal unit LOL.
Yet we still have enough in the fridge /cupboards to get through until Sunday.. its amazing what you can make with what you have when you really have a think about it!
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