Ronnie Kahan does not like to hear about people throwing away their lettuce. If you compost lettters, it takes about two weeks to decompose. If you throw it in the bin, you can bump that number up to twenty five I mean sorry, twenty five years. That is as the founder of food rescue charity OZ Harvest, Runnie is an expert on preventing food waste on a massive scale. But what about on the small scale? Yep, she can help with
that too. So what should you do with that soggy letters and wrinkley tomato that's sitting in your fridge right now? My name is doctor Amatha Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy in Ventium. And this is how I work a show about how to help you do your best work. On today is my Favorite Tip episode, we go back to an interview from the past and I pick out my favorite tip from the interview. In today's show, I speak with Ronnie Kahan.
And before I logged on for my interview with Ronnie, I was looking at my fridge and saw that I had some very ordinary looking lettuce and some cherry tomatoes. That have seen better days. So I wanted to know what I should be doing with the contents of my fridge to help prevent waste.
So with your lettuce, do you have an onion? By any chance?
I can't eat onion. It doesn't agree with me.
Not a problem. Take your lettuce, were in a pot with some stock, aha and hudsh it up? If you had a potato, if you had any other veggies other than the cucumber, we won't put the cucumber in there. I've got some carrots, carrots beautiful, Throw them in there because you will have beautiful soup. Beautiful.
Oh give me some other tips that okay, common things that people would normally throw out, But what can we do to rescue them?
Well, lettuce is the first thing that everybody throws out, because it sits in the bottom of the fridge till it goes sludgie, and then we forget about it, and then it's too late to do anything, and then we kind of throw it in the bin, and we don't even put it into compost. Do you know that if you throw a lettuce in the bin, it will take twenty five years to decompose. Why put it in compost. It'll take two weeks.
Oh my goodness.
Wow, you tell me if you're ever going to throw a lettuce away again into the bin.
I'm never going to do that, Ronnie, never ever.
Good. So don't end buy the two for one specials if you think you might not use you both your lettuces unless you're going to make lettuce soup.
Wow? What else? What else can I be doing? So?
Tomatoes when they go a little funny, are divine grilled. You can add them to free tata with your cucum.
If you think they're a little soft, all you have to do is you can cut them into rounds, or you can slice them and put them into a little bit of vinegar, water, pickles, pickling peppers, bay leaves and pickle them.
These things are not hard to do. I'm sitting with a couple of apples that look a little soft. As soon as I get off this call, I'm just going to chop them up, put them with some sultanas, cinnamon stick, a little bit of water, cook them up, and I have the most beautiful stewed apples.
Wow. What are some other things that you find are pretty common in households that get thrown out? When you could be doing something pretty amazing with them.
Bread's another big one that we throw out. It's obvious that you could make bread and butter pudding, but you could use it for French toast. You can freeze bread beautiful. So if you buy a loaf of bread and you think you're not going to use it all, slice it. Put half of that bread in the freezer, don't buy the next two days later, use what's in your freezer. You know, our freezer is like the pause button. We're not using our freezers. Well enough.
I like that. How about shopping, Like, what should I be thinking about when I'm at a supermarket or at the paran markets where I do a lot of my shopping and I'm buying produce. What needs to be going on in my head?
The most important thing is nothing should be going on in your head because you should have a list in your hand, because before you go shopping, you want to check your fridge, you want to check your pantry, and you want to make a list. It's going to save your money and you're only going to buy what you need, which you can then use within the next few days. So really, we've got this beautiful mantra, Look by cook store, look what's in your fridge and pantry. Buy what you need,
store it properly. So for example, if you've bought too many herbs, freeze, if you've bought too much, or you think you're not going to use it, allocate and work out how but store it and then cook it and eat it and of course use the leftovers.
So simple like how many times a week would you be doing food shopping?
So I don't do big shops. I do little shops. I buy what I need. I'd rather go past the organic shop or at my market.
I now do.
Were very fortunate in New South Wales because US Harvest does a fruit and vege box, so I get my fruit and vege once a week from ours Harvest, so it's veggies with a cause, and I make that last through the week. I try not to buy other things through the week. My supermarket shopping. I buy very little processed food. I mainly buy fresh, so I don't do
big supermarket shops. And I'd rather go and buy my milk every few days if I'm I use almond milk or you know, I buy my eggs fresh from the market once a week, so I'm really try not to do a lot of shopping. If I'm going to buy a fish, I'll buy it on.
The day for the day I love that, so.
Fresh, local and as little as possible, and stretch it as far as possible.
I hope for you are our feeling inspired to whip up some delicious food with what's currently sitting in your fridge. And if you're looking for more tips to improve the way that you work, I write a short fortnightly newsletter that contains three call things that I've discovered that help me work better, which rained from interesting research findings to gadgets and software that I'm loving. You can sign up for that at Howiwork dot co. That's how I Work
dot co. How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from dead Set Studios. And thank you to mattin Nimba who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything sound better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.