Intro
Whether you’re a family or a single person who has a problem with wasted food, there are options to help eliminate waste.
If you’re looking to keep your food fresh for longer, ultimately avoiding waste, follow these tips to keep your food lasting as long as possible.,
1. Tight Packaging
If you’re not storing your groceries in air-tight packaging, you’re increasing the chance of your food going bad quickly.
When your foods are wrapped up tightly or sealed correctly, it allows for oxygen, moisture, and bad things to seep into your food, making it spoil prematurely.
Examples of this include failure to wrap up your bread, which can make the bread stale or even allow moisture to expedite the molding process.
Another example is your pantry staples which most consider immune from going bad.
However, if not properly stored, like rice or pasta in a non-airtight container, moisture can seep in from other pantry foods or the home and cause those foods to mold.
2. Refrigerate or Freeze (the Right Things)
Not everything can be put in the refrigerator or freezer to extend its lifespan, but many things can be. One example of extending your food’s life span is in regard to meat.
Putting meat that you cannot eat within a few days in the freezer rather than in the refrigerator will extend its lifespan by months as it freezes the aging process.
The same can go for bread, meal-prepped foods, and more. All you’ll need to do is defrost or properly bring the food to temperature for cooking or consumption according to food safety guidelines.
Freezing or even refrigerating to slightly slow the aging process is a great way to keep many foods good for longer, even “forever.”
3. Keep Fruits and Veggies Separate
Some fruits and veggies can have adverse effects on one another when packaged together. Bananas are especially vulnerable to being ripened quickly – usually more quickly than you would have liked.
It’s recommended that you keep your bananas and other sensitive produce away from one another to make sure they stay fresh until you’re ready to eat. On the other end, you might choose to pair certain options together in order to speed up the ripening process.
For example, if you have an avocado that needs ripening, placing it in a brown paper bag with a banana can help to speed up the ripening process. Why? Because aging bananas release a certain compound that makes other things in contact age quickly!
4. Get Cheese Wrap
Cheeses are vulnerable to going bad quicker than they can be consumed. That’s because cheeses are very delicate.
The slightest imbalance of something like moisture levels can leave your cheese molding prematurely, particularly for fresh cheeses. To help keep your cheese healthy until you’re ready to consume, make sure to package it correctly.
Cheese paper or wax is excellent for keeping moisture out and your cheese dry or in whatever state it thrives in. Also, many fridges come with a section that is moisture or temperature control – great for sensitive foods like cheese to avoid premature deterioration.
5. Don’t Rinse Until Ready to Eat
A lot of times, the thing that makes food go bad is moisture. When you choose to rinse your berries or vegetables long before eating them, you run the risk of the excess moisture wilting or spoiling the foods before you can finish them.
To avoid this, it’s recommended that you don’t rinse your foods until you’re ready to eat them. Instead, store the produce as is or in an air-tight no-moisture container until ready to eat, then rinse the portion you want. This process can help to keep the food good longer.
Conclusion
Nobody wants to waste food, but unfortunately, it often happens. In order to reduce your waste and keep the food you purchased good, we’ve rounded up these tips to know.
As a rule of them, you want to avoid allowing excess moisture or elements to interact with the food, which can all cause the item to age faster.
For more tailored tips, research how to preserve a specific food or substance you’re struggling to keep fresh. There are plenty of other tips for specialty options out there!
