Reducing Food Waste

I've reading recently that the average household throws away between 13% and 33% of the food they buy. Dan and I are particularly aweful. Even though I plan menus for the week, we end up eating out, and therefore throwing away the food that we were supposed to eat that night.

We also spend a great amount of money eating out (not to mention on the food we are throwing away). I spent yesterday morning totalling up how much we spent eating out in the last year eating out. I am not brave enough to share the actual amount, however, if we didn't eat out last year we could have went on a cruise in the Bahamas...twice. If we didn't eat out, we could have had a down payment on a house. If we didn't eat out, we would probably each weigh about 13 pounds less!

This week I am making a bigger effort to use up leftovers and cook the food I buy. I bought considerely less at the store this week. I'm going to make dinners depending on the need to use up items, using the items that will go bad quickly first.

On a side note, after researching food waste today, I found many articles on how bad it is for the environment because it doesn't probably decompose in the landfill because of lack of oxygen. I always thought it did decompose easily because food is organic.