10 Teched-Out Techniques for Saving Food [Foodwaste]

Hey America: You waste almost 40 percent of the food you produce. WTF? Sure, you can actually address that by making behavioral changes, but, uhm… boring! Fortunately, we will fix this. With gear.

Dehydrate

Water will be the essence of life, but its presence actually makes food go bad quickly. Dehydrated food = long life. Just ask your 7-Eleven clerk how long the beef jerky sticks were sitting there. You are able to dehydrate food to prolong its usefulness with numerous home food dehydrators. And dehydrating stale crackers and chips can bring them back to realistic that holy water in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Plus, it’s hard to turn down anything with model names like ” Snackmaster ” or ” Jerky Xpress .” While most home dehydrators are pretty wonky looking, the L’Equip wouldn’t look out of place next to that server rack for your kitchen.

Cool It

Like the Cold War nuclear arms race, refrigerator companies have long played a game of one-upmanship (minus the threat of nuclear annihilation). Today, apparently every fridge maker is touting its own technology to slow waste. GE has its ClimateKeeper2 System. Bosch boasts a VitaFresh technology where sensors let each compartment regulate its own humidity. Liebherr offers an identical function with its BioFresh Technology. But you know what’s probably just as useful? Low-tech solutions: fridges with glass doors or more room or French doors that don’t forget to can see what foods you definitely have. My readers consistently say their biggest source of wasted food comes from items getting pushed to the back of the fridge.

Get Informed

Wondering how long a food item stays good? The StillTasty App for iOS has you covered-from ” Angel Hair Pasta, cooked” to ” Ziti-dry, uncooked.” Optimum is the ” alert me” function that warns you when certain items on your fridge are approaching the not-so-tasty phase. Or you would stick to the old-fashioned method-create an ‘eat me’ shelf on your fridge. StillTasty’s site can be helpful and answers life’s persistent questions, like: boxers or briefs? Must I refrigerate ketchup?

Sign, Seal, Devour

In addition to being an oxymoron, freezer burn is preventable. Or at the least delayable. Keeping the air out of the food you freeze is the major. Vacuum sealers of all stripes will do the trick here, but Food Saver has one of the most tech-ish looking versions. These stationary vacuum sealers have the feel and appear of a laser printer. By comparison, using Reynolds’ Handi-Vac is equivalent to the dot matrix printer experience. And don’t underestimate the facility of a sharpie here: Label your bags with the name of the food and the date. Be sure to include the year, Mr. Dewey .

Call Now?

Ethyl alcohol = pure alcohol = grain alcohol, which has its undergraduate uses. But ethylene-the gas emitted by many fruit and veggies as they ripens-speeds produce’s decay. So enclosing ethylene in supermarket plastic bags will likely be counterproductive. Infomercials to the rescue? Evert-Fresh Green Bags claim to make fresh food last 3 to 10 times longer and Debbie Meyer boasts a 30-day life for some products stored in her Green Bags. But word on the net is mixed about whether or not the luggage are a total FAIL.

Donate

Your parents told you to ‘clean your plate because there are people starving in [some country].’ Some of us might need stormed out in a fit of youngster rebellion, giving our blessings to mail their left-over dinner to the less fortunate. Nobody has quite discovered tips to try this yet, but you are able to donate the excess from your backyard fruit tree or garden because of Ample Harvest . The location allows those with homegrown abundance (or perhaps that traditional donation canned goods) to search out local food banks nearby.

Plan Ahead

Supermarkets are, like, designed to make you buy too much, which essentially guarantees you’ll waste food. Epicurious’ iPhone App helps you avoid that fate. Choose one of the crucial 25,000 recipes, and create grocery lists from the mandatory ingredients-so you you buy only what you’ll actually eat. Resisting that six pack of store-baked donuts is on you, though. The app also helps you find another recipe to exploit up the remaining of that rosemary or rutabaga.

Watch Your Snack

The world generally is a rough place. Your fruit needs defending-like a football helmet protects the brain. OK, bad example . But when the stakes are slightly lower, corresponding to the number of dents to your banana, the Banana Guard is a crucial addition to Western Civilization (and something absolute to puzzle post-apocalyptic archeologists). Fortunately (for us and the archeologists), a similar company now offers non-phallic fruit protection . And within the knit category, there’s an entire line of fruit sweaters, including Apple Jackets and the pun-free Pear Jackets . If you are with bruised product despite your entire fruit-babying, one gadget can salvage that fruit-a juicer.

Put it within the Ground

Even once you’re super vigilant, some food will still go bad before it’s consumed. And then there’s the inevitable peels and scraps. For plenty of of us, that suggests composting these remains. But for apartment dwellers and city slickers with out outdoor space, there’s the uber-nerdy Nature Mill . The machine composts continually, emits surprisingly minimal odors and looks the same as an old desktop PC. What you do along with your newly made fertilizer is another question…

Looking Abroad, Ahead

The Europeans are very good at reducing waste. Hopefully, as with The Office, Survivor and that Idol show, we’ll see imported versions soon. One German supermarket uses RFID tags to stay on top of when meat has reached its expiration, hustling it off the shelves so you don’t prove with expiring or expired foods. But for shelf-stable foods, the expiration date is commonly meaningless. Enter Britain’s Approved Food and drinks , which sells these cast away, but perfectly good items on its site. And the UK company Kitchen Waste Bags makes an app that tallies the pricetag of the food we’ve wasted , hopefully providing slightly incentive to circumvent future occurrences.

Jonathan Bloom runs the blog Wasted Food and tweets as @WastedFood . His book on the topic, American Wasteland , comes out October 12. Bloom lives in Durham, N.C., where he’s been known to enjoy a barbecue sandwich or three.

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This post is tagged: angel hair pasta, behavioral changes, indiana jones and the last crusade, nuclear annihilation, nuclear arms race