Simplifying Your Life in a Throw Away Society

Are you a keeper or a tosser? I am definitely a tosser – I have been known to wipe the clutter from entire surfaces strait into the garbage out of pure irritation. This has gotten me into sticky situations in the past, as I am sometimes none to careful about what I throw out. I remember one time in particular that my husband could not locate a very important document (ahem, amongst his clutter), and he accused my of throwing it out when I was trying to clean up his stuff. I denied it, I got my back up, I pointed the finger back at him and stated that if his stuff was clean and organized that we would not have to be looking through countless messy boxes full of crap – all along I was desperately praying:

“God, please, I beg you to help us find this document. I promise that if we find it I will never go through my husbands stuff and throw things away again”

You see, just the week before I went on a mad cleaning spree that included emptying a couple of the boxes into the trash without careful examination and it was coming back to bite me. Since that day I think I have prayed that prayer a couple more times, although a bit differently:

“Okay God, I messed up again, I did it again, but this time, if we can just find it, I promise not go through things randomly and just throw them away. I have definitely learned my lesson this time!”

In case you are wondering, in all the times I prayed, God was totally faithful and had incredible mercy on me and helped us to locate the missing item (God cares about the details), and it has been a couple of years now that I have had to pray such a plea (see, I am learning my lesson).

I talk a lot about de-cluttering and getting rid of the excess in your life and I think that is very important…Yet, there is one area that I think that we are bad for just mindless tossing – and that is food.

How much food do you think you waste every day? How about in a week or a year?

When I first starting thinking about this I thought I wasn’t doing that bad – after all, I have hungry teenage boys that will clean other’s plates and their own. Yet the more I thought about it, the worse it seemed to be. Things like a cup of coffee left in the coffeemaker, or that half a cup of coffee or milk that the kids or I didn’t finish were the first obvious culprits, but then I started thinking about food that my kids took to school and didn’t eat, only to be thrown out, or the produce that we never got around to eating that went bad and had to be tossed, or leftovers that got pushed to the back of the fridge and now look like a scary science experiment. Once I really started thinking about it I realized that my family throws out more than I had originally thought.

My challenge now is to start going through my fridge mid-week and finding ways to use up food that is about to spoil, instead of discarding food that looks questionable at the end of the week. Also – if in doubt, make less or take less. Throwing out a cup of coffee or a half a glass of milk may seem small and insignificant at first, but it speaks to our overall attitude about wastefulness.

How do you think your family does at not wasting food? What small changes do you think you can make to decrease food waste in your home?

Interesting articles about food waste:

Food For Thought: America's Food Waste

Lessons From History: Don't Waste Anything

Food Waste Friday - The Frugal Girl (challenges us to keep track of how much food we are wasting)

Related Posts:

Simplifying Your Life - Part I

Simplifying Your Life - Part II - How Much is Enough?