How to reduce food waste this holiday season

“During the holidays, we eat more [and] we entertain more. So we have new dishes, larger portion sizes for numbers of guests that may or may not arrive."

by Gianna Melillo | Dec. 26, 2022

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For many Americans, the holiday season means preparing and eating more food.

There are several steps Americans can take to cut down on food waste in their own households this year.

These can include repurposing leftovers, being mindful of portions cooked and donating untouched items to food banks.

The holiday season is often a time of excess — excess time spent with family, excess shopping for gifts, and excess cooking.

Americans waste around one-third of all purchased food each year, but whether it’s leftovers from parties or uneaten fruitcake, food waste tends to rise between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.

Compared with any other time of the year, Americans throw away 25 percent more trash during the Thanksgiving to New Year’s holiday period, amounting to around one million extra tons of garbage per week, according to data from Stanford University’s Waste Reduction, Recycling, Composting and Solid Waste Program.

Food also accounts for around 24 percent of all municipal solid waste, according to the according to the EPA, while the average family of four loses around $1,500 each year to uneaten food.

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“During the holidays, we eat more [and] we entertain more. So we have new dishes, larger portion sizes for numbers of guests that may or may not arrive. Our whole routine gets upset,” said Brian Roe in an interview with Changing America. Roe is a professor in the department of agricultural, environmental, and development economics at the Ohio State University and an economist who focuses on food waste.

“We’re more likely to — as we entertain — not want to create too little food and so we’re oftentimes going to over-prepare items,” he continued.

But there are ways Americans can cut down on food waste this holiday season. Doing so will not only reduce methane emissions released when food ends up in landfills, but will also help curtail energy used throughout the food supply chain. That can include energy expended on labor, processors, transportation hubs and retailers, along with chemicals and water used on food.

For Roe, one key way to cut down on food waste is to encourage people to take home leftovers or excess food.

“I just encourage people to love their leftovers,” he said. “We can also get more creative with our leftovers and kind of take on an experimental mode by thinking of new and exciting things to do with leftover ingredients or just leftovers themselves.”

Several apps and websites exist that let users plug in ingredients they have on hand and offer up new recipes to use that food.

“If you can get one more meal a night out of your fridge with these high food prices, that’s a win-win,” Roe said.

Introducing composting into your routine can also help. By composting organic material into soil, consumers can cut down on landfill waste and create a new resource. But composting doesn’t address the food supply chain energy used prior to consumers buying the product.

“Composting is by far the better approach than putting things in landfill,” Roe said, “But it doesn’t reduce the amount of waste being created, typically.”

Donating untouched food to food banks, soup kitchens or other charities can also be an option, along with being more mindful about portions prepared and ingredients purchased. This can include taking inventory of what’s already in the refrigerator and cupboard before going shopping.

Because food can travel around 1,500 miles to get from the farm to your plate, using locally grown food or ingredients in holiday meals can help reduce one’s carbon footprint.

Freezing excess food for consumption down the line is another good alternative to throwing it away, while using recyclable or reusable containers when serving food can help cut down on landfill waste this holiday season.

In the United States, greenhouse gas emissions from wasted food is equivalent to that of 32.6 million cars. And although the country has pledged to cut food waste in half by 2030, more can be done to raise awareness about the issue, Roe says.

“I think people forget about the environmental linkage, because they think food is natural. It’ll decompose but they really forget about that decomposition creating methane and causing additional environmental impacts,” he said.