At the grocery store, you’re a person who roasts squash. You make salads. You have exciting plans for fresh herbs. A week later, you’re a person throwing away unused squash, salad, and wilted herbs.
Even food-waste experts know the gap between the meals we imagine and the food we actually eat. Shelie Miller, who studies sustainability at the University of Michigan, understands how an acorn squash can end up in your cart without a plan. “It’s fall. I’m feeling the fall vibes,” she says, describing the temptation. That’s why she and her husband try to stick to a shared grocery list—and know what they’ll do with what they buy.
We asked experts what else they do to keep good intentions out of the trash.
Read more: How to Stop Wasting So Much Food in Your Kid’s Lunchbox
Make a kitchen-sink potato
Once a week, Miller bakes a potato and gives the odds and ends in her refrigerator somewhere to go. Leftover fajita vegetables? On the potato. Little extras from other meals? Those go on, too.
“I always call it a garbage potato, or maybe it’s better to call it a kitchen-sink potato,” she says. The toppings change often enough to keep things interesting: “My husband always plays a guessing game of what my potato is going to be this week.”
The potato solves a familiar problem: You have some food left, but not quite enough to call it lunch. Miller combines those small portions on something she already wants to eat. “It’s such a great blank canvas,” she says.
Stir-fries can serve a similar purpose. But Miller knows where her loyalties lie: “My go-to is a potato.”
Give broccoli stems a chance
Jonathan Deutsch has watched fellow cooks buy cases of broccoli, cut off the florets, and throw away the stems. He considers this a terrible loss. The tender interior of a broccoli stem, he says, is “one of the most delicious vegetables.”
Deutsch, a professor in the department of food and hospitality management and founding director of the Drexel Food Lab, cooks both parts at home. The night before we spoke, he made broccoli salad with tahini and chili crisp. The stem was woody on the outside, so he peeled it, cut up the tender interior, and then air-fried it along with the florets.
Trim the woody bottom and peel away the tough exterior as needed. Deutsch wants people to recognize the good food underneath.
“The same care and love that went into the florets,” he says, “went three inches lower into the stem.”
Give your ingredients a second assignment
A recipe that calls for half a cabbage leaves you with another decision: What happens to the other half?
Miller and her husband try to answer that before they start cooking. Cabbage rolls might take care of some; soup or a roasted side dish can use the rest. The same thinking applies to the tomato paste left in a can or the extra chicken breast in a package. “Getting comfortable with all the different ways you can prepare different ingredients really helps extend the menu,” she says.
Deutsch starts by checking what’s already in his kitchen. When his now-adult daughters were teenagers, they would announce there was nothing to eat. He could usually find the makings of a meal: a can of tuna, a can of beans, or chicken in the freezer. Only after taking stock would he figure out what he needed to buy.
“Instead of generating more waste that you have to deal with, you’re taking surplus food,” he says, “and you’re making it into new things that you want to eat.”
Put your apples in the fridge
Brian Roe is willing to commit to a Costco-size bag of apples. He just doesn’t leave it on the counter.
“I’m an apple kind of person,” says Roe, a professor of agricultural, environmental, and development economics at Ohio State University who leads its Food Waste Collaborative.
He keeps the apples in the refrigerator, where he says he rarely loses one to spoilage. On the counter, he’s more likely to throw a couple away before finishing the bag.
Shop in your freezer first
Miller knows what can happen to food you freeze with the best intentions: “It just goes into the abyss of a freezer.”
Eventually, you clean it out and find “freezer-burned chicken breasts and chili from three years ago,” she says. “What happened?”
She and her husband now make a point of shopping in their freezer before deciding what to buy or cook. Sometimes, that means discovering they already have lunches covered for the week. Other times, it means remembering the portions of tomato paste they froze after a recipe called for only a spoonful.
There are only two of them at home, so a big batch can mean eating the same dinner several nights running. “By the fourth day, the last thing you want is more gumbo,” she says.
Their approach: “We’ll eat a day or two of leftovers. We’ll freeze the rest.” Then, when they need lunches another week, they can pull out a meal they haven’t just eaten three days running.
File your soup
Miller’s husband has figured out how to fit more leftovers in their freezer: He freezes soups and other liquids flat in zip-top bags on a sheet pan. “It ends up like these little folders of soup,” she says.
Once frozen, the thin packages stack neatly, taking up less space than bulky containers. Use bags intended for freezing, leave room for liquid to expand, and follow safe cooling, storage, and reheating practices.
Keep a stock bag
Deutsch keeps a bag in his freezer for the parts of dinner that don’t make it onto the plate: onion trimmings, mushroom bits, and herb stems. When he’s ready to make stock, he has a head start.
“Stock is like magic,” he says. When people wonder why their soup doesn’t taste as good as their favorite restaurant’s, he points to what might be missing: stock, along with generous seasoning. He also uses it in place of water when cooking rice, polenta, or vegetables to give them extra flavor.
He’s selective about what goes into the stock. Add beet scraps, and “you’re gonna have a pink or brownish stock,” he says. Add broccoli trimmings, and “it’s gonna have a little bit of a cabbagey broccoli smell.” That could be delicious in broccoli mac and cheese, but it’s probably not the flavor you want in butternut squash soup. “You have to be a little strategic about what goes in there,” he says.
Make leftovers worth looking forward to
Roe’s air fryer helps him get another meal out of restaurant leftovers. Recently, he used it to reheat half a tuna steak and vegetables his wife had brought home. “That makes things kind of tasty and crispy again,” he says.
He thinks about the next meal while putting food away, taking an extra minute to make leftovers easy to reheat. The goal is “storing your leftovers in a way that helps you want to use them the next time,” he says.
Sometimes, that means turning last night’s teriyaki chicken into today’s salad. His adult son has found another opening for leftovers: breakfast. “They’re the freshest they’ll ever be because it’s the first meal after,” Roe says.
Ask for ideas before buying more groceries
Ground turkey, two green peppers, and feta: Is that dinner? Deutsch suggests asking a chatbot before adding anything else to your grocery list.
He’s experimented with AI to find ways to use ingredients on hand, and recommends giving it more than a list of what’s in the fridge. Tell it how much time you have, what equipment you’re using, and how comfortable you are in the kitchen.
“Make me an easy recipe with these ingredients,” he suggests instructing your AI platform of choice. You can ask for something that takes less than 30 minutes, too—so you don’t discover halfway through the instructions that dinner needs to marinate overnight. “You could really customize it,” he says.
Buy portions that match your appetite
Throwing away part of a chicken breast means wasting more than dinner. It also wastes the resources used to raise and feed the chicken. Animal products generally have a larger environmental footprint than plant foods, Miller explains, which makes keeping meat, eggs, and dairy from going uneaten especially consequential.
Her rule: “Respect the protein.”
Miller and her husband still eat meat, but they’ve started serving smaller portions. “Meat is an accent to the meal,” she says. They’re trying to avoid a familiar outcome: “We both have two huge chicken breasts and waste a quarter of them.”
Plan for your guests—not an army
Roe describes himself as an evangelist for buying less food—a habit that’s followed him home, “maybe not to the happiness of everybody in my household,” he says.
When they’re having people over, Roe tries to calculate what guests will actually eat, while his spouse comes from a tradition of making sure there’s enough to “feed the army.”
At Thanksgiving, Roe uses the Guest-imator, an online tool from Save the Food that estimates how much to prepare for a gathering. “A lot of it is just buying less or really thinking about what’s being purchased and why,” he says.
Don’t make plastic-free the only goal
Miller studies the environmental impact of plastic packaging. She also has a freezer full of soup in zip-top bags. “Very honestly, we go through a lot of single-use plastic,” she says.
Her research helps explain that choice. A 2022 analysis she co-authored found that plastic packaging accounted for less than 10% of the total environmental footprint of 23 out of 30 foods across most measures examined. And in a 2019 study comparing meal kits with grocery-store meals, the greenhouse-gas savings from reduced food waste outweighed the extra packaging emissions.
Miller uses reusable containers for lunches and tries to minimize disposable items. But she considers what the packaging helps her accomplish. “A good zip-top bag is really hard to compete with for certain applications,” she says.
For her, the environmental cost of throwing away food matters more than the bag used to save it. “When you look at the environmental impacts of food waste versus a single-use plastic bag, the food waste is the much more important thing,” she says.
“My big philosophy is not to sweat the small stuff,” she says.
Compost what you can’t use—but try to eat it first
Miller collects food scraps in a metal pail with a liner. “It’s nothing fancy,” she says. But she doesn’t consider composting a substitute for eating the food she buys.
“A lot of folks think, well, hey, I’m composting, so it’s OK to waste food,” she says. Composting can’t recover all the resources used to produce food that never gets eaten, so she focuses first on using what’s in her kitchen—whether it becomes lunch, soup, or next week’s potato.
When food does go uneaten, “throw it in the compost rather than the trash if you have that option available,” she says.