Every year in the United States, 30 million tons of food goes to waste. 98 percent of this waste goes straight to the landfill. If you love food and the environment, it's easy to cut down on the waste. Love Food Hate Waste is a campaign from WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme in the UK) which shows that by doing easy, practical, everyday things in the home, we can all waste less food, which benefits our purses and the environment. If we all stopped wasting food that could have been eaten, it would have the same environmental impact as taking one in four cars off the roads. The website offers awesome recipes to use up leftovers, handy hints and tips for storing food to make it last longer, a portion calculator to help you cook the right amount and information on what food date labels mean.

 

Not much of a cook myself, I usually troll cooking websites for the easiest, quickest recipes to make in my ingredient-sparse kitchen. Love Food Hate Waste offers a page that asks "What food needs using up?" and guides you to recipes that include that specific ingredient. Since I was craving tuna, and always have frozen veggies and uncooked pasta on hand, I made Tuna Pasta Bake. I tweaked the recipe a little bit, using a random assortment of frozen peppers, broccoli, tomatoes and spinach, and covered the bake with homemade breadcrumbs (a few days old toasted bread, crumbled up). The bake turned out delicious, and froze well for more leftovers. The recipes are simple and tasty, and they even have a vegetarian friendly section. If I can be successful with these recipes, anyone can!

 

For more tips on how to be eco-friendly with your food, see MNN Food for 10 Ways to Curb Your Food Waste.