The Minimalist on Maximizing Food Life

To paraphrase Kingsolver: Bittman, Minimalist, Awesome.

I was very excited to see Mark Bittman’s piece on freezers as a way to prolong food and avoid waste. And after reading it, I was not disappointed.

I love that he used the words “reduce food waste” in his opening paragraph. And that the article is so user-friendly. Basically, Bittman, a.k.a. The Minimalist, advises readers to use the freezer in two ways:  

The first: take raw ingredients you have too much of — or whose life you simply wish to prolong — and freeze them. The second: take things you’ve already cooked — basics like stock, beans, grains and the like, or fully cooked dishes — and freeze them.

Also, Bittman tells us to think of frozen food as being in “suspended animation.” In other words, you’re basically delaying food’s decay. But that only lasts so long, thus:

Use what you freeze, within weeks if possible, but certainly before the next harvest rolls around. This isn’t so much a question of safety — frozen food will rarely go “bad” — but of quality.

Finally, The Minimalist leaves us with this tip to help avoid intra-freezer food waste:

One more thing, easy to overlook and impossible to overrate: Label. It is incredible how much things grow to resemble another in the freezer.