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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

I've found that the best way to reduce wasted food at home is by establishing and maintaining your food budget (groceries _and_ eating out), and gradually reducing it until you don't have any wasted food.

People (myself included) get carried away buying stuff, even groceries. Without planning you will quite easily blow past your budget and then stuff will sit in your fridge and rot.

Or another scenario: you buy a bunch of groceries and then eat fast food all week and throw most of your groceries away. Gotta use what you bought or it will go bad.

It's very easy for a family of 3 in the US to spend $2K/mo on food and throw most of the groceries away. If you drive that down to $1K/mo, you can eat pretty well, and there won't be much wastage.

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I think part of the problem is, at least in my experience, buying stuff you tell yourself that you’ll eat but rarely do.

If I were to be more honest with myself in a store, I’d cut down on food waste. My problem is I see certain things, and think to myself, oh I’ll eat those. But in reality, only ideally I’d eat those. What ends up happening is I get hungry and look into the fridge for something to eat, only to see that exact thing staring me right in the face before I say, damn nothing to eat.

As well, going to the store more often. Buying only a couple or three days worth of groceries makes it easy to lower food waste. When I try to buy over a weeks worth of groceries I find myself having to throw away things more often.

There's an easy solution to the problem you describe: intermittent fasting once a week. You eat your dinner, and then eat nothing at all until the next dinner. Longer intervals are also possible, but I've found that for me 24 hours works the best. You won't believe how appetizing even the most unappealing items in your fridge will look after just one day of not eating anything, especially if you're physically active.

> As well, going to the store more often. Buying only a couple or three days worth of groceries makes it easy to lower food waste. When I try to buy over a weeks worth of groceries I find myself having to throw away things more often.

Exact opposite is true for my family. If I meal plan and shop once a week, we eat everything because everything was bought for a specific purpose. If we are more loose with it, we buy too much, and end up throwing out stuff. Of course, you could meal plan for 2 days or 3 days and also go to the store that often, but that seems like a complete waste of time. Save for the occasional spontaneous idea, or for things that can't keep for a whole week, meal planning and shopping once a week have cut down our food-budget and waste significantly. Of course, learning to buy the right amounts for a whole week takes a while. A couple of weeks at least.

> It's very easy for a family of 3 in the US to spend $2K/mo on food and throw most of the groceries away. If you drive that down to $1K/mo, you can eat pretty well, and there won't be much wastage.

When I was reading the Mr. Money Moustache blog some time ago, one of his first advices was to cut food spending, saying that "you don't need to spend $1k/mo on food with these few tricks". And I was completely baffled by these numbers. I spend €300/mo on food ($340), and that includes eating out at restaurants nearly every workday for lunch, something that I plan to stop.

(Now, granted, Germany is a cheaper place to shop for groceries than the US from what I've heard, but still, wtf.)

Even in the US, 1k/month is still an extravagant food budget for a family of 3. If you don't eat out and cook using staple ingredients & raw foods it should cost 100-200/month per person. If I'm not eating out, I spend ~60/month, but as I hunt I almost never buy any meat at the grocery store.

Other things that drive costs up are buying 'healthy' prepared foods like fresh breads, using a bread machine I pay 0.45/loaf of whole wheat, 0.60 for rye bread. It takes ~15 minutes in the morning to prepare and set the machine,compared to 6-10 per loaf for good quality bread. It isn't necessary to spend copious amounts of time in the kitchen to eat well, I typically spend 0:30-1:00 cooking, and we eat leftovers 2-4 nights per week. For instance, soups are often cheaper & easier to prepare in large batches. I don't want to eat the same meal for a week straight, but servings can easily be frozen for later. As a bonus, these frozen meals can then be served when there isn't enough time to cook a meal.

I don't know where you live where a healthy grocery bill is less than $10 per day per person _including_ eating out occasionally. This is with very few organic ingredients (basically I only buy organic if it costs roughly the same). Organic bill would be at least 50% more.

Where I live it costs about 40-60, depending on the restaurant, to eat out once, and a single trip to a grocery store is rarely less than $100 (and that's not enough for a week).

I said excluding eating out, that drives up food bills dramatically. I also avoid organic, but the reasons would be off topic.

I tend to classify eating out in the entertainment budget, so eating out once will mean not going to a movie. I did this when I noticed I was spending 500/month for lunch at work. Having to make the conscious decision to sacrifice a fun activity helps to put this in perspective.

I very seriously doubt you can survive in Germany less than 4 euro per person per day, including restaurants. What's more likely is you haven't carefully tracked where your money goes. Try it for a couple of months at least. The results are guaranteed to surprise.

I have a Gnucash file and meticulously track every expense, both cash and card.

Meal planning in advance helps with that (both in not eating out and in using all the food purchased before it goes bad), but it's time consuming and you have to stick to it.

We're a family of 4 and I cannot imagine spending even $1K on food for a month. Even half that would be way overspending.

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