For food shopping make a list around a loose meal plan; check fridge and pantry; note what you need.
Check dates on perishables: meat, fish, dairy, or eggs—nothing else is a safety concern. You can safely eat milk and eggs past their dates, if they don’t smell or look rotten. Seek cartons with a longer shelf life.
Buy long-lasting, hardy fruits and vegetables. Dense produce, i.e. cabbage, apples, potatoes, fennel, cauliflower, and carrots, stay fresh for a while in the fridge, unlike lettuce, peaches, and berries.
Rather than shop for everything every trip, do one or two pantry shops per month. Fill the gaps with fresh, perishable ingredients (vegetables, fruit, dairy, etc.) in between.
Assemble shelf-stable standbys (oils, vinegars, grains, pastas, nut and seed butters, and canned and dried ingredients): have fridge full of long-lasting augmenters like hot sauces, fermented sauces and pastes, condiments, cured and pickled things, crunchy bits (nuts and seeds), aged grating cheeses, and butter.
Specialty stores–local butcher, fishmonger, and green markets let you buy by weight, helping to avoid overstocking. It’s only better for the environment over time if you travel without a car or make a stop while driving elsewhere.
Eat in order of perishability. Some produce is best consumed uncooked and quickly, like lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, fresh herbs, stone fruits, and tender berries. Eat first, before they’re limp or slimy. With extra raw produce, consider freezing, mixing it into a longer-lasting salad, cooking into a fresh pasta sauce, blending up gazpacho, or baking in a crisp or crumble.
Cook raw veggies ASAP. The sooner cooked or cured, the longer a vegetable will last (cooked food lasts longer than uncooked food in the fridge). For big-batch vegetable cooking, roast different vegetables in separate sheet pans simultaneously to increase your oven’s output. Wrap root vegetables like potatoes or beets in foil; roast them directly on the oven rack alongside sheet pans. Cook fresh produce with less seasoning to start, so leftovers can be reimagined and embellished for days with pasta or rice.
Rethink waste. Use bones, peels, stems, cheese rinds, pasta and rice water, and more—in many ways. Preserve, pickle, candy, or freeze them.
Food storage: for delicate groceries, if your fridge is prone to freezing vegetables with high water content—a little too much ice in your iceberg lettuce, wrap them loosely in a kitchen towel before laying in the vegetable drawer.
Store basil on the stem, in a glass of water; all other herbs in the fridge, cleaned and dried, in a paper or cloth towel inside an airtight container.
Label leftovers with name and best-by date if not in clear containers or bags that help you quickly scan the fridge or freezer when ready to cook or snack. Put similar items near each other.
Freeze food. Overripe bananas can be frozen whole in the peel, defrosted later to put in banana bread batter. Freeze store-bought bags of sliced bread, flatbreads, or tortillas and revive in the toaster.
Stash freezer bags or containers to collect what’s left over from ingredients used often; save excess canned tomato, chopped scallions, cilantro, or parsley stems (dice and throw into beans, soups, stews, and pastas).
Keep track of fridge and freezer ingredients. Move older items to the front for easy access.
www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/guides/how-to-reduce-food-waste/?campaign_id=290&emc=edit_wcd_20240102&instance_id=111529&nl=the-recommendation®i_id=73809878&segment_id=154104&user_id=0ed3c9e1d30f8a325170f1082047c267
A.I.
https://decrypt.co/200932/ai-energy-use-environmental-concerns-crypto-mining
https://decrypt.co/200932/ai-energy-use-environmental-concerns-crypto-mining