A friend and I were at lunch the other day, and she was telling me how she was trying to re-mold her semi-new boyfriend into repurposing different foods and leftovers, and to stop throwing out perfectly good food. Like me, she loves cooking and is constantly intrigued by new ingredients and produce she comes across. And also like me, she’s very anti food waste and always trying to make sure she uses everything she has and doesn’t let things go bad. So, it makes sense that she was a bit disturbed when her boyfriend would cook, and he’d throw perfectly good ingredients into the trash bin without a thought. If a recipe called for one cup of diced potatoes, and he happened to have an extra half cup, without hesitation, he’d take the leftover half cup and toss it into his compost bin. He said he didn’t want to “create imbalance in the recipe” by adding too much potato. She immediately told him he was crazy and wasting food, and he could either add those remaining potato cubes into the pot, or just repurpose them for another recipe the next day or so.

“But I don’t have plans to eat anything with potato in it the next day or so,” he countered to her.

“Then throw the potato pieces into the pot!” she raised her voice at him, clearly getting exasperated. “Recipes are just guidelines, but you’re supposed to adjust and tweak as you see fit!”

When I was growing up, I was constantly told I had to finish every last grain of rice on my plate because if I didn’t, I was ungrateful and didn’t realize how hard my parents worked to provide this food. I was also told that when cooking, we should waste nothing — there was always a use for some food we had, and we had to make use of it before it went bad. Letting food rot was not an option. Food cost money, and money was hard to earn. We always ate all our leftover food; if Ed and I didn’t, then our parents would take the leftovers and eat them for lunch at work. I cannot remember a day when either of my parents went to work and actually bought lunch because I always remember seeing them pack their lunches for themselves the night before a work day.

That memory ended up influencing me as an adult: when I was working in an office, I rarely bought lunch out and always brought homemade food in, unless we had a scheduled colleague or team lunch, or at my last in-person company, where lunch was provided and comped by work through Seamless. So, this really ran deep with me. Plus, because I am passionate about food and cooking, I feel personally hurt when I hear about people wasting food thoughtlessly. It feels like money literally going into the trash or drain, which hurts my heart. I also think about all the real people who labored to grow that food, how likely underpaid they all were, and how their work just goes to waste when their perfectly good food is thrown out. That money could have been spent on something else, or that food could have fed someone who really needed (and would have appreciated) it. One friend said to me, “Do you really need to eat that a third day in a row? You make enough money to not have to worry about that and can eat something new.” I retorted back that it didn’t matter how much money I make or have; I am anti food waste. It is the principle that is bad, and food waste is a huge problem in our overly privileged society where food is seemingly plentiful. I don’t want to contribute to society’s problems more than I already inadvertently do.