Part 1: Reduce food waste and save money - Smart cooking and meal prep

According to the National Food Waste Strategy, households are responsible for around 30% of Australia’s total food waste - the largest share from any single sector. The rest occurs across farming, manufacturing, retail, and hospitality, where some waste is unavoidable due to production and transport losses.

Overall, about two-thirds of Australia’s total food waste is considered avoidable, and while households aren’t the only source, reducing domestic food waste remains one of the most effective ways to save food, save money, and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Before doing your food shopping, check what’s already in your fridge and pantry, and make a shopping list to buy only what you need. Sure, the peaches, nectarines, plums and mangoes look tempting, but will you get around to eating them all before they go squishy?

Another benefit of sticking to a meal plan shopping list is that it helps curb impulse purchases, which, more often than not, are highly processed items like half-price chips, lollies and soda. With less of that in your pantry, you might be more likely to snack on fresh produce in your fridge before it goes to waste!

Once you’re cooking, think about ways to use the whole ingredient - it not only reduces food waste but also stretches your grocery budget.

Vegetable peels and trimmings can be frozen and turned into homemade stock, stale bread can become breadcrumbs or croutons, and overripe fruit works perfectly in smoothies or muffins.

Not every food scrap can be used, of course - nobody’s making eggshell and banana peel soup. How you dispose of this waste is very important. Keeping a composting caddy in your kitchen makes it easy to collect unavoidable scraps during food prep.

In more and more areas of Australia, councils are collecting food waste separately to create compost - rather than the methane that’s created when it ends up in landfill. If your council doesn’t yet have a composting scheme, and if it’s practical for your home, look into getting your own composting bin or worm farm.

Many people throw food away because of confusion around labels.

Use-by dates are about food safety - don’t eat anything past the date on the packaging.

Best before dates, however, refer to food quality. Food that’s past its best before date is often still safe to eat if it looks and smells fine.

Understanding this subtle but important difference could save your household a surprising amount of food.

Every apple, loaf of bread and litre of milk takes energy, water and transport to reach our homes. When food is wasted, so are those resources. Reducing household waste helps ease pressure on the food supply chain - and complements the work of food rescue organisations such as OzHarvest, which redistributes surplus food from retailers to people in need.

Across Australia, every household can play a part. Reducing wasted food at home might seem minor, but when millions of kitchens make small changes, the collective impact can be significant.