Using Mindfulness to Reduce Food Waste

Mindfulness has been touted for its many personal health benefits, but I think it can be utilized in the reduction of food waste.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, a pioneer of mindfulness and meditation, defined mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.”

Mindfulness has been shown to have many health benefits including, but certainly not limited to, decreased stress, increased focus and better working memory. Mindful eating has also been utilized to aid in weight management and craving control, for example.

So what if we employed mindfulness to food waste?

What if we purposely paid attention to how much food we wasted on a daily or weekly basis? For one week we could keep mental track (or better yet a journal) of all the food we wasted at home and at restaurants, for example. The results may be shocking and it might help us make changes and work towards reducing food waste.

What if we took a mindful moment at the grocery store? We can ask ourselves while we are at the store if we can really eat that entire bag of spinach before it goes bad and needs to be tossed. If we are realistic, maybe we will opt for the smaller bag and thus reduce our food waste.

What if we were more mindful when cooking? We can pay attention to how much edible food scraps we are wasting and seek alternatives for these scraps. For example, those carrot ends and peelings can go into a broth bag (check out more here).

Mindfulness can be easy to implement and since these micro mindful moments can easily add up, I believe it is definitely worth a shot. Let’s hack our mind with mindfulness to fight food waste and hunger.