I tend to make my real New Years Resolutions in September for Rosh Hashanah, but this year I am making one resolution at the secular New Year: waste less food.
I do a fair amount of cooking, and I love leftovers, so I don’t feel like I’m wasting enormour amounts of food, but I’m not particularly good at estimating how much food will be eaten at any given meal, and after a few days of leftovers I sometimes forget that there’s one more serving of something waiting for me in the fridge. Fast forward two weeks when I find it, moldy and disgusting, and destined only for the compost heap.
Clearly this isn’t a huge deal, but it’s something I do feel guilty about, given the halakhic concept of bal tashchit, or the prohibition against needlessly destroying or wasting food. So this year, I’m going to start keeping track of what I put in and take out of the fridge, in the hopes that I waste less food, time and money. It’s a small resolution, but one that I think I might actually be able to follow through.
