I buy grapes thinking I can recline in a Toga and have someone pop them into my mouth ...but that never happens and they go bad than get tossed .
I buy bananas and when they are finally perfectly ripe ...then I'm not in the mood for bananas.
Again just more stuff headed for the trash .
What do you buy and end up throwing out before using ?
You can always freeze them to avoid spoilage. Frozen fruits can also be used as a quick smoothie if you prefer a cold drink. Just make sure the grapes are seedless though.
Any type of sponge cake for me always ends up molding. I usually just take a bite and don’t want it anymore. Stopped buying one when no one to share it with.
Lately I’ve had some blueberry muffins get wasted. Local bakery sells only 4 packs and they are huge. Delicious but inevitably one gets crusty or yucky before I get to it. Still buy them though. They don’t take well to freezing.
We try very hard not to end up with food on hand that spoils before we use it up. Scraps that are suitable are composted along with the peels, hard vegetable stems, etc. If we mess up and find a forgotten rutabaga or something that is now suspect for human consumption that goes in the compost bin, but that would be unusual in our home.
Bread that gets too dry to make a top flite sandwich or whatever gets air-dried and used as bread crumbs for cooking. We have an advantage that some folks do not have; our generally low humidity means most everything dries before it can go moldy.
Dinner leftovers get eaten as a lunch or snack within a day or so. Some dinners we make enough of so we can freeze for a future “no-work” dinner.
As was mentioned fruits and veggies can be frozen and used in a smoothie. We have smoothies every morning, so fruits and some vegetables can be used in those. Freezing items that are getting too ripe, but before spoiling is a great way to make use of them.
I run the refrigerator at 36 F (2 C) which is colder than what many folks do, but that does extend the life of foods that can be refrigerated. Yes, that costs extra electricity but it is solar and we have enough capacity, so it is not a factor for us.
I keep my fridge quite cold too. It is a newer unit so it is far more efficient than the state of the art icebox that just refused to quit so I still save power wise. I also compost aggressively with veggie bits and the tons of leaves around here. My waistline suggests I don’t let much go bad. I do not like waste when so many people are going hungry.
Not to change the subject, but do we have any flashlight folks in the areas where the tornadoes hit in Kentucky?
I have never bought food that I ended up throwing away. Fruit, veggies, oatmeal, tofu, bread, seeds, nuts: All get eaten. Before I went plain, simple vegan six years ago, same thing. I ate all the pizza and burgers and chicken that I bought. Before I quit going to restaurants, I never left any food on my plate. I am six feet even, 163 and a half pounds, big, bulging sculpted calves.
EC03: Still rocks!
I try to not let that happen, but…
Bananananananas have a “just right” window of about 38min. Before, they have that puckery persimmony taste, and after, they self-destruct into a nasty brown moosh.
Bought a bag of apples, barely touched ’em, and they’re already starting to feel slightly mooshy. Gotta probably process ’em all and make a compote or something.
Jars of tomato sauce… ugh, once opened, they tend to get moldy in no time, so (like today) when I opened a jar for homemade pizza, I’m gonna be making single-serving spaghetti and such ’til it’s gone, or turns furry.
Bread/rolls/bagels… right into the freezer, because if I wouldn’t live on them for days straight, they get moldy. At least freezing ’em holds off that process a while.
Yeah, grapes, other fruits. Gotta eat ’em ’til you’re sick of ’em, or they go rotten.
Avocados. If I ever buy the Costco bag of 6 (8?), they come home hard as rocks and inedible, and then at some random date in the future every single one turns black and disgusting inside.
Ugh, tell me about it. That “just right” window is I think 38 sec for avocados.
Rocklike and hard one minute, all brown and mooshy inside the next.
never?
well, i will eat Some, just not All.
1. spaghetti sauce on sale. buy 2 get 3 free. actually use 4.
2. lard. local butcher has it in large portions. ~15% eventually goes rancid.
3. potato chips. i cannot eat absolutely ALL of the contents. crumbs get tossed.
Used to have a big dog. Didn’t feel bad giving him the leftovers that didn’t get eaten. We used to mix the people food with his dry. Big bowl of it. He used to gulp it down and the onions were left at the bottom. Never knew how he did that. Turns out dogs aren’t suppose to eat onions. Don’t know how he knew that. Compost pile for the organics. At today’s high prices we try to eat everything up.
Used to buy cucumbers that never ended up getting sliced and eaten.
Stopped buying them many years ago becasue of this.
In general if this happens then stop buying it, no matter how much you intend to get to it its better to have the cash in your pocket, especially these days.
NOTHING.
Wasting food is a cardinal sin for me and any accidental spoilage in the fridge is a heartbreaking discovery. No exaggeration. I’ve lived in the third world all my life and multiple times when I was a minor my mother had to juggle two or three jobs (one full time and one part time, so literally morning-afternoon-evening) to land us enough cash to have a good nutrient intake, and even today beef is a barely affordable luxury.
If you’re gonna buy food and just let it spoil, would you kindly not buy it.
EDIT: Wow, talk about a fly-off-the-handle moment there. Though I don’t take back what I said, I apologise for the aggression. 
While i agree with you, you get more flies with honey and vinegar.
About half of all food grown is wasted, but flying off the handle won’t help.
You need to explain the problem and show how to fix it in a way people can relate to.
I was taught to finish my plate and that’s how I taught my own kids. Now that it’s just my wife and myself, we cook every other day or so and eat the leftovers multiple nights.
Bread, i’ve stopped buying it because it gets moldy before i can finish it. i started eating the mold anyway if it were blue or green or white.
Tomato or pasta sauce starts growing blue and green and white mold even in the frig after a short time; i haven’t gotten up the nerve to eat those, but i just skim the skin off the top and use a long spoon to scoop it out without touching the sides.
Anything in bulk size, like bags of potatoes, sweet potatoes, avocado, apples, oranges, etc. i’ve stopped buying. These packages are budget priced versus buying the single item, so that is tempting, but they are just too large to consume before going bad.
1 lb sausage i have quit buying. i would see it on sale and get one thinking about baking sausage balls. If i didn’t make a batch right away, then it goes out of date. A whole batch takes a long time to eat and then i’m sick of them. But its been a while since the last time, so now i better go buy a tube. 
Make ’em, freeze ’em.
We have lots of things we make that would serve 6 people at once. We eat for two that night, divide and freeze for another day when we won’t have to actually cook much. We do that with a green chile pasta I make. Then when we defrost, het and eat all we need to cook is the fresh vegetables to go with the green chile pasta.
I agree with freezing, i buy in bulk from Costco and freeze stuff, from breakfast sausages to ground beef to prepared muffins.
Heck i freeze Dominos pizza, two slices per freezer bag. And i freeze rice, make extra, freeze most of it for quick microwaving when i am in a hurry or tired out (instead of fast food).
I have found four small cups of coconut yogurt in the refrigerator which my wife bought before she left last September on a 3-month visit to New Jersey. I don’t eat yogurt. So she advised me to use it in making banana cakes, which I did.
Now there are still two cups. And I have just discovered that their expiry date was 24 October. This expired yogurt can go into the compost for fertilizing the plants.
I unearthed some cottage-cheese in the fridge that I thought was recent. Was going to have some with pineapple, fruit cocktail, whatever I could find. Had an eerie taste, like Band-Aids™. Eww. Looked at the date… ancient. Yeah, no. Tossed it.
Sad part is that I also completely forgot about the now-open can of pineapple ’til just a few days ago. Was like looking into a Petri dish. Yeah, no. Again. Tossed.
I would’ve eaten the pineapple plain if I had to, but things just get blocked by other things, and you forget.
Like with the pizzas I made today, I cut right into a new block of mozz right from the freezer. Only after I had it sliced, did I find the last 1/3 of a block from last time buried in the fridge. Still good, so that’ll be for grilleded cheese tomorrow/today.
Funny thing is, I knew I had some mozz left over, looked, looked, looked some more, then “Hmm, I guess I was wrong.”. Doh!
Shiite happens, and it sux when things get tossed, but I’d rather do that than get sick.
And I’d better not forget about the tomatoes, or I’ll be really pist.
Aside from cans of soups and ravioli, and stuff like pb&j, olives, roasted peppers, sauce, etc., I pretty much just eat fresh food anymore. So if I want burgers, I’ll get a ~1lb package, use my burger-press (thanx, vipon!) and squeeze 4 “quarter-pounders” out of it, 2 to eat, and 2 to freeze for the next day. Not beyond that. But stuff like fruit, veggies, etc., all have VERY finite life in the fridge or even freezer.
And I learned to buy organical milk. It has a funny taste, but lasts a long time, vs “regular” milk which is already going sour before I even get to the last 1/3 of the container. Wellp, I only really use that for farina, those Knorr side-dishes, etc., and maybe chocolate milk, and use ½&½ in milk, which seems to “keep” pretty well.
So a good part of not wasting anything is just mentally “tracking inventory”. And sometimes, it’s just, “Hmmm, I have x, y, and z… now what can I make with that?”, and cook accordingly.