In Your Home – Page 9 – Sustainable Lawrence

Proper Food Storage: Apples

Do you have an overabundance of apples at this time of year and no takers? Learn how to properly store apples and other food from savethefood.com

REFRIGERATE IT:

Yes

AT FRESHEST:

Up to 6 weeks in the refrigerator, longer in a root cellar environment

OPTIMAL STORAGE:

Do not wash until ready to use. Store in a breathable bag in the low-humidity drawer of the refrigerator. Handle carefully to prevent bruising, and separate any with bruises from other apples (or they will cause others to brown). Apples ripen 6 to 10 times faster at room temperature. For large quantities, store in a cardboard box covered with a damp towel in a root cellar or other cool place. Ideally, you would wrap each apple individually in newspaper to reduce their influence on each other. Many heirloom varieties are not suited for long-term storage, so try to eat them right away.

Are you wasting 20% of the food you buy?

That is equivalent to throwing out a grocery bag of food in the trash for every 5 you buy each week.

Consider that, along with this statistic from the National Resource Defense Council – the average American household throws out $2,200 worth of food every year.

These statistics got me thinking about the food waste patterns in our own home. How much money was my household throwing out by not consuming it? What are my food waste traps?

To start, I thought we likely wasted little food as we rarely buy in bulk. We cook often during the week so the chances that we wasted food were minimal. Boy, was I wrong!