I don’t think it’s strange or all that difficult to eat leftover bits and pieces that are just a few days old. I get that you were trying to follow a specific set of guidelines, but if it was going to result in wasted food and disappointment then it’s kind of silly for a budget-conscious and somewhat picky shopper to have done so. Like someone else said, proper food storage would have made a difference (dousing the avocado in citrus and keeping it in an airtight seal are key). But I also think being a slightly more imaginative cook would have, too. Like, you could have thrown some of the scallions and celery into your bean dish to add flavor and avoid composting them. Or used that with the chicken to make stock in your crock pot. While composting is good for the environment, your approach still counts as wasting perfectly edible food in my book. And it sounds like you don’t like rice all that much, in which case that was on you — you should have looked at how rice-heavy the recipes were and found an alternative at the outset. (Honestly I found the talk about your diet preferences -apples are enormous?- kind weird and off-putting. But I generally dislike talk about how much someone does or does not eat.)

Maybe what you should have done was sat down and taken stock of your groceries and recipes for the week, so that you were clear on what aligned with your preferences and how much of which ingredients the recipes were going to use, and worked around them (by editing from the start or deciding how to use leftovers faster/differently). I think you’re giving too much guff to the Lenny Letter mom for just trying to give a novice a set of parameters to work with vs a Gwyenth Paltrow-style lifestyle overhaul. I’m sure even the mom lady would have been like, “honey, do whatever works for you — I’m just trying to help.”