Are you tired of throwing away veggies from the back of the icebox and bits and bobs leftover from meals? Stop the madness and start to reduce waste with meal planning! This process can be as simple or as detailed as you’d like, but all of us can find a meal planning system that works for us and includes budgeting, preserving and upcycling leftover foods, and even growing our own! Here are four doable steps for reducing food waste with meal planning. 
More Zero & Reduce Waste Ideas for Later
5 Ways to Avoid Food Waste at Home
The Zero Food Waste Kitchen e-Booklet
For homesteaders, one of the worst words in our language has to be waste. The idea of wasting any resource, especially food we may have grown ourselves, is maddening.
However, even the most conscientous among us can lose track of what’s in the back of the fridge. The following are four simple ways you can reduce waste with meal planning, plus a lot of suggested articles for further reading and even more meal planning.
Everyone has a way of meal planning that works for them – not all methods are one size fits all! Don’t be timid about exploring new options or ditching systems that simply don’t work for you.
Reduce Waste with Meal Planning
There are myriad topics we could tackle in the kitchen to reduce waste on many levels. Today, we’re going to be covering a mere four ideas regarding meal planning for you and I to work on this month.
Winter is a great time to get a handle on reducing waste through meal planning because we don’t have the huge harvests and produce volume that we deal with during the summer. Even if you aren’t growing much of your own food yet, the “off season” is still a great one for setting goals and making plans for the coming year.
- If you have the goal of reducing the waste coming out of your kitchen this year, then you’re already conscious that this is a problem for you. Perfect! Knowing where we need to improve is as important as figuring out how.
Meal planning is a broader umbrella topic that includes many of the things we’ll be talking about. Here are the four areas we’re going to discuss today:
- Budgeting to reduce waste while meal planning.
- Actually formulating a plan to reduce waste with meal planning. To work a plan, you must have a plan.
- Using garden produce or bulk buying to reduce waste while realistically planning meals.
- Learning to preserve and upcycle foods to annihilate waste while meal planning. Seriously, this is key!
Reduce Waste with Budgeting
The first thing we have to be realisitic about when it comes to coming up with a workable meal plan is our budget. We can’t make complicated plans that our pocketbook can’t support.
The first step to effective budgeting is to be willing to make small changes to improve upon poor habits. Here are some ways you and I can adjust our habits to help our budget – we may be doing some of these already!
- If you and I can learn to eat leftovers as they are and/or upcycle them into new foods, then we can count that as a budget win. The more we can get two meals out of one set of ingredients, the more we save.
- When we know we won’t be home to use leftovers, many of them can be put in the freezer. Starchy items like rice don’t freeze particularly well once cooked, but sauces, meat dishes, and veggies can usually be frozen for later use. Here’s an article Morgan’s Farmhouse explaining how to freeze leftovers beautifully.
- If we do forget our leftovers and they go beyond where we might want to eat them, if we get them out to the livestock before they go bad, we can count that as another budget win. We didn’t waste those leftover AND we were able to augment the livestock rations on the homestead.
Nothing can replace actually learning to set and purchase within a budget, but these little victories can help motivate us to be careful with our food and our money. To help you get started, we created some worksheets for making a basic grocery budget and meal plans. Hope they’re helpfu!
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Reduce Waste with a Meal Plan
The old saying goes that if you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail. This is very true when trying to reduce waste with meal planning!
Because it’s not in my personality to spend a lot of time on details, the meal planning in our house is very basic. We plan a week at a time using a chalkboard that hangs in our kitchen.
For inspiration, I have a whole bookshelf in my kitchen that’s filled with cookbooks. I get several of them out and put them on the table for all of us to look through. If someone wants something special, they go to the shelf and nose around or ask me about it.
- This leads to super fun conversations about recipes, quality food, growing our own ingredients, and lots of memories about past holiday and Sunday meals and desserts.
On Sunday, we take down the board and everyone writes in their meal plan for the night they cook. All of my children are old enough now that they’re each responsible for a dinner night. When all my kids were small, I filled in this board by myself.
(I’m so glad that I taught them how to cook when they were small even though it was a challenge a lot of the time!)
Get Organized to Make it Happen
Once the board is filled out, we make a grocery list. Before we go to the grocery store to buy something new, we:
- Check the fridge and freezer to be sure we don’t already have the item. How many times have I just assumed we’re out of something and end up buying food we don’t need?!
- We also look for leftovers that can be upcycled into a new recipe that week.
- Finally, we check the pantry shelves, including the food storage room. We have a lot of home-canned items that we can use in place of store bought. Because they have a shelf life like any other preserved food, we try to use up our home-preserved items first.
We’ll talk more about food preservation in a following section – it can be a huge help with budgeting!
- Some people prefer to plan meals ahead for a whole month so they can look for special sales and bulk buying options. That’s a great idea and if you’re that kind of planner, go for it!
(I keep bulk dry goods in storage all the time, so I keep a separate budget for them. It’s usually and annual budget, instead of a weekly or monthly one.)
More Resources for Meal Planning
The following are a variety of options when it comes to meal planning.
If you’d like to explore the once-a-month idea but are more of a canner, check out our Once a Month Meals: Home Canning Schedule article. (We even have a book to go with it: Once a Month Canning!)
The Meal Planning Binder from Little House Living – this will be especially useful for those of us who like a tangible planner with everything organized.
Homespun Seasonal Living shares seasonal foods we should consider: A Guide to Seasonal Meal Planning.
Living Clean on Clean Eating Meal Plan from Our Simple Homestead can help you think healthy as you make your plans.
A Farmish Kind of Life keeps it real with how she tackles Homestead Menu Planning with a crazy family schedule.
Six Month Meal Planning with A Modern Homestead can help you enjoy some serious money saving. (It’s not as complicated as it might sound, FYI.)
Reduce Waste in the Future: Cook With Your Kids
This is a big plug for cooking with your kids while they’re young so that they will grow up understanding the basic of food preparation. They will naturally reduce waste as they cook, eat, and clean up leftovers if they’ve been exposed to your cooking processes and values while they’re young.
There isn’t a quick hack for this; it takes time, commitment, and patience. The truth is, including kids in the kitchen means you’ll end up with a bigger mess, a slower meal, and a lot more clean up time.
- But homestead kids aren’t interuptions to our work; they are our most important work. If you’re blessed to have them in your home, take the time to include your kids and grandkids in the rhythms of the work you do with food.
This one thing can result in huge, healthy dividends down the line. Not only can you spread around the work of meal preparation in your home, but you’re helping your kids create healthy relationships with their family and their food.
To ponder this a little more when you have time, I suggest:
Healthy Little Foodies, The Benefits of Cooking with Kids
10 Benefits of Cooking with Kids, by Little Sprouts Learning
If you’re really ambitious, try Canning with Kids SafelCanning with Kids Safelyy
Reduce Waste with Produce
Produce is perishable, so it might seem weird that I would include using it as an important step in meal planning to reduce waste. Hear me out.
First of all, vegetables are an important part of a healthy diet for everyone. If you’re on a low-carb diet or a vegetarian, they’re vital!
When we work with fresh veggies, as opposed to something coming out of a box, it grounds us a bit more in the reality of food. Fresh produce has seeds and stems and bruises that all need to be cut out and dealt with.
- We realize that food is messy business and each part can be used. The waste becomes food for the soil when we compost. Waste is only waste when it’s wasted, after all!
This interaction with the whole fruit and vegetable reminds us that what’s done on an industrial scale (and produces waste) can be managed more economically on a home-scale. In our kitchens, there’s no need to add preservatives or throw anything away.
- We cook fresh foods, eat them, compost the leftovers (or feed them to livestock), and involve our whole family in the process.
- If we learn to grow our own food, we can close the loop even further. Close the loop refers to creating a self-sustaining cycle of production, use, and waste management (harvest -> eat -> compost) that doesn’t require outside input.
The following are a few ideas on how you can involve yourself with fresh produce and reduce waste in your kitchen!
Involve Yourself with Produce
I’m going to start with the most committed way to get involved with fresh produce; to grow your own. The other methods for avoiding food waste by getting connected to fresh produce are a lot easier.
Grow Your Own: Learn to grow your own food in some amount – you don’t have to grow everything. Start with something small like lettuce or something beloved like tomatoes.
Plus, growing your own reduces your food budget once you’re growing infrastructure is in place and gardens are established. Here are a couple of gradening specific articles to help you consider the idea further, if it’s new to you.
Succession Planting to Maximize Your Harvests, by Grow a Good Life.
Grow a Keto (Low Carb) Garden, by us here at Homestead Lady.
How Much to Plant for a Year’s Worth of Food, by Melissa K Norris
Buy in Bulk: Visit your local farm or farmers market regularly and find the vendors who will sell to in bulk for an economical rate. These foods can be used in season AND preserved for later use as meal components or meals in and of themselves.
The health benefit to this method of meal planning is that you’re using produce that is ripe and in season. This is a vast improvement on grocery store produce that is picked before it’s ripe so that it will be firm enough for shipping.
- In short, this local, ripe food is full of the maximum amount of sunshine, and therefore, the maximum amount of nutrition.
Learn to preserve foood also looks to the future and anticipates times when you’re too busy to cook from scratch. Home preserved foods can be used in the exact amount that’s needed for the people at home that night.
Preserve & Upcycle – Reduce Waste of the Verge of Food Death
If you haven’t started preserving food yet, no worries! You can start small and learn one new method or food each year. In no time, you’ll be a pro!
You can preserve fresh fruits and veggies, but you can ALSO preserve leftovers so that you don’t waste them if you don’t have time to eat them that week. In short, don’t waste any crop or meal that’s on the edge – can, dehydrate, freeze dry it all before it goes bad!
Be sure you meal plan for these leftovers and fresh items. If you don’t work it into your schedule, the food preservation won’t happen.
Save those leftovers and upcycle them into new recipes – freezer meals, crockpot meals, dehyradtor meals, and freeze dried meals. To help with that, grab your cheap-0 copy of our upcycled food recipe and idea booklet, The Zero Food Waste Kitchen!
For More Ideas, Especially for Preservation:
Canning Meals in a Jar from Practical Self Reliance
How to Use Home Canned Foods (With Example Recipe) from us here at Homestead Lady
Dehydrated Egg Roll in a Jar from Purposeful Pantry
Using Dehydrated Food from us here at Homestead Lady
Make Ahead Freezer Meals from Creative Simple Living with Schneider Peeps
5 Freeze Dried Meals to Make Ahead from Azalea Homestead
8 Ways to Preserve Food From the Garden
I know that was a lot of information and a big topic, so feel free to let me know if you have specific questions by leaving a comment below. I’ll do my best to point you in the right direction!
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