Avoid Food Waste With Eat First
If you find yourself buying more fresh food than you actually eat, or letting your deliberately stored leftovers languish in the refrigerator before you finally throw it in the trash, it might be time to reorganize your food storage system and do what you need to eat at once the easiest access.
In other words: you need an Eat First Shelf.
You can install an Eat First (or ETF) shelf in both your refrigerator and cupboards if you like. All you have to do is designate a place – preferably a highly visible place – in which you will place in a conspicuous place the leftovers, food, hard-boiled eggs, that specialty meat package that you opened yesterday, anything that has a relatively short shelf life. …
Then, the next time you need to prepare a meal or snack, you can start by pulling items off the ETF shelf.
I learned about ETF Shelf from MarketWatch via NerdWallet , but it has been around for a while now. In fact, you can find “Eat First” printed signs at StopWaste and I Value Food stores if you want to hang up a sign to remind yourself and / or family members … well … eat this first .
Of course, not everyone in your household may agree to participate in an ETF shelf project. Listeners to Judge John Hodgman’s podcast may remember a recent episode called “Warm Up the Criminal,” in which Hodgman ruled that a wife cannot command her husband to follow ETF principles, and a husband can choose from any of the foods in the refrigerator:
Yes, food waste is a terrible thing and you want to minimize it every step of the way. However, as I said, we are only human. What will happen after this life, I do not know. As far as I know, this is the one we have. And you are allowed to eat what you want to eat, which is good!
If you are going to install an Eat First Shelf, it would be a good idea to make sure the foods that go on the shelf are the foods you want to eat first. (Buying or preparing food just because it is “beneficial” or “good for you” is somewhat counterproductive if no one actually eats it.)
You will also want to remember to move products onto the ETF shelf as their perishability increases or their shelf life approaches. For example, if you have a stack of yogurt cups tucked into the back of your refrigerator, remember to move them to the Eat First section before they expire.
And then enjoy the food you’ve worked so hard to buy, prepare and organize, and enjoy the fact that eating everything before it goes bad means not only less food waste, but also less time wasted cleaning the refrigerator.