Summary:

No food wastage isn’t easy to do, nor is eating healthy or moderately, as food gifts are galore, especially around festive seasons and birthdays. 

Given the best circumstances (like an organised pantry), notice your most commonly used ingredients, source out food ideas (like recipes you would cook), and hashtag them in your archive of recipes, ready to ‘pull out’ and use leftovers.

Backstory:

“I want to reduce food wastage. But, I also want to eat healthy.” How often have you heard this from those around you, living in Singapore? 

Ah… as one grows older, one is wiser. 

One problem commonly experienced is when the festive season rolls around the corner, like Christmas or Lunar New Year. There is much celebration and also many gifts. One of these is food gifts. We are talking duck, roasted chicken, ham, cans of abalone, ‘nian gao’, dried mushrooms, ginseng, cookies, cakes and ‘ba kwa’.

Okay, as one can see, the food list stretches long. So I throw out the idea of eating healthy (first)and think of eating ‘moderate amounts’. This is more plausible for this essay as I narrow down the topic to “reducing food wastage”. 

Is it really possible to reduce food wastage? Particularly if you stay alone or you are living in a small family? 

Whether you cook for yourself or you have a small family, when you bundle all the food gifts together, it can make a year’s supply of food (assuming one does not eat the same food every day).

Befaced with this dilemma year after year, how not to waste food versus how not to overeat, has become an art of living and a craft that is quietly honed. 

There are options. Food can be given away or shared with friends or neighbours. But then, one discovers later many friends or neighbours either never eat at home much, or cook (even heating up and thereafter washing up is a chore to some). That was when one realised reducing food wastage was more challenging than one realised. 

At home, not wanting to waste food is becoming a habit, and still a challenge, in 2025.

Working at keeping organised, wet and dry pantries, is still an ongoing focus.

And, if you hoard recipes (I still do, but purposefully for the intention of using up an ingredient), I hashtag ‘#’ main ingredients in my digital device. For example, #udon #lettuce #pumpkin, so that I have an archive of ideas to source from to cook these leftover ingredients.

Sometimes, what one wants to cook (given available time and amount of energy) versus what one wishes to cook versus external factors (as in the above with food gifts)are real-life problems.

You would think that after preparing meals for so many years, I would have an easier time solving food wastage, but the real answer is ‘No’. With shifting sands of time, there come newer factors to cope with.

Once I stumbled upon a book called “How to Cook Everything” in the library, and thought this might help me solve the ‘leftovers’ problem. Alas, many ingredients in the book weren’t found locally, so many ideas could not be quickly used in the local context.

Nonetheless, the book title is inspiring and motivating as a goal to work towards!

#wiser #leftovers #realifeproblems