Tips for Waste-Free Holidays  

For most of us, the holidays are about spending time with the people we love and sharing special meals and food together. During the holiday season, between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, more food goes to waste than at any other time of year. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, each year, about 200 million pounds of turkey meat are thrown out during Thanksgiving week alone. The good news is that there are some simple ways we can celebrate food and community without the waste.

Reducing food waste at home doesn’t require drastic lifestyle changes. By making small shifts in how we shop for, prepare, and store food, we can toss less, eat well, and save money during the holidays and all year round. Here are some effective strategies to get started:

1. Plan Ahead

Keep the menu simple and limit buying specialty spices and ingredients that you won’t use beyond the one recipe. Choose dishes that celebrate the bounty of vegetables in season—squash, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and more—and keep it light on animal products that cost more and require a lot more resources to produce. Keep in mind the people you have coming: both the number and any dietary restrictions they might have. Save the Food’s Guestimator tool lets you input the number of guests on your list and the dishes you plan to make to ensure you don’t cook more than you need.

2. Send guests home with leftovers

Ahead of the gathering, save yogurt tubs, take-out containers, and other packaging you would otherwise recycle so you can send guests home with goodies. In the Filipino tradition, sending guests home with “baon,” or leftovers for a future snack or meal, is a way of extending the love and bounty of the meal.

3. Turn leftovers into new meals

Turkey sandwiches are tasty, but there’s so much more you can do with holiday leftovers! Soups, pot pies, croquettes, curries, and even desserts like bread pudding and cranberry sauce cookies, are great ways to reinvent leftovers. Get creative with what you have and bring that energy into the new year.

4. Give homemade treats as gifts

For easy personal holiday and hosting gifts, skip the online orders and try making edible DIY goodies like preserved lemons, homemade granola, veggie pickles, apple sauce, and more! Find recipes and tips here.

5. Give back to the community

This holiday season, consider supporting local community organizations that rescue surplus edible food and redistribute it to those in need. Especially smaller operations depend on word of mouth, monetary donations, and volunteers to do their essential work. To find a group near you, start here:

StopWaste Food Recovery Organization Directory

For more tips and recipes to make the most of the food you love during the holidays and all year, visit StopFoodWaste.org, a project of StopWaste.