There’s been a lot of press recently about eating locally, organically, lowering your carbon footprint and so on, but it seems to me that wherever you get your food from, however it is grown, it is a shameful waste of resources if that food gets thrown away, rather than nourishing human beings.

When my husband and i were saving for a down payment, we were disgustingly cheap, to the point of eating left overs for days. it was disgusing. Now I too think it is important to have standards, and to remember that food is a renewable resource, while not wasting it.

Speaking of Grandma’s, my Grandma was born in 1917 and was a homemaker during WWII, I remember her telling me how disgusted she was when she went to a neighbor’s house and her neighbor showed her all the laundry soap she had hoarded in her basement during ration time. It is such a differnt world, i can just go to BJ’s and stock up, and it is more effecient for me to have a lot rather than make more trips. Anyway, differnt world.

As my stepson pointed out the other day, the government now refers to us as consumers instead of citizens. We have an economy built on the premise that we will buy, buy, buy. And that’s just not how grandmother lived.

We’re told by home economists over and over again to plan ahead and only buy what is on the shopping list. Yet stores are set up to seduce us into the impulse purchases! I think it takes mindful shopping to build up our anti-impulse muscles. That’s not to say that if we see a great buy on something we use often and it isn’t on our list that we shouldn’t take advantage of it–I didn’t have evaporated milk on my list, yesterday, and somehow missed it on the sale flyer that it was on sale for 1/2 price. I frequently use it as a substitute for cream in a recipe, so I stocked up on it. But, even though it is canned and won’t spoil for a long time, I only bought enough for about a month’s supply.

I really think it boils down to being mindful of what we do instead of being pinged about like a pinball by people/influences whose business it is to get us to part with our hard-earned money. They WANT us to waste our money and our food because it means more of our money for them. (Note: I don’t think it is some great big conspiracy–I just think that they have become efficient in “helping” us spend our money…even the government encourages us to spend money on credit!)

Fifteen years ago, when one of my boys was a teen-ager, he worked at a local steak house. For a few dollars more there, a patron could add the food bar option to his entree. My son told me that the wastage was horrible. People would eat at the food bar and then couldn’t eat the meal they had ordered. He said whole plates of food would come back to the kitchen untouched and had to be tossed. The manager eventually re-organized the whole menu, dropped the food bar altogether, and added a salad bar. That was the first time that I became aware of food wastage.

But — on the other side of the coin, it’s also important not to eat spoiled food. I try to manage the contents of my refrigerator. We eat scraps of left-overs for lunch (and that makes it difficult for me to eat according to a diet plan). But when we slip up, old or spoiled food should be discarded. I’m a believer in keeping food fresh.