10 Japanese Fridge Habits That Eliminate Food Waste (Copy Them)

Open your fridge right now. Don't tidy it first. Just open it and look at the bottom drawer. There's a bag of spinach in there going to slime. Half a cucumber with a soft end, a carton of something you bought for a recipe three weeks ago and used two tablespoons of. You know it's there. You've been not looking at it for days. The government's own number says the average person in this country throws out about $700 of food a year. Call it close to $3,000 for a family of four. That's not a leak. That's a car payment going into the trash can in little green bags. I had a neighbor for almost 20 years named Keiko. She married a boy from here and moved into the house two doors down, and she kept a refrigerator about half the size of mine. Fed a family of five out of it. And in all those years, I never once saw her scrape a drawer of rotten vegetables into the garbage. Not once. I asked her about it enough times that she finally just started showing me. Her word for throwing food out was mottainai. It means something like, what a waste. And she said it with a face like she'd stepped on a tack. I've run my fridge her way for a long time now. These are the ten habits that stuck, the ones that actually moved the needle. I'm counting down, and number one is the one that changed how I shop, so stay for it. Number ten, stand your vegetables up. Everything green in my fridge stands up the way it grew. Celery, asparagus, green onions, a bunch of cilantro, kale, the works. A tall jar or a cut-down milk jug with an inch of water in the bottom, right in the door or on the top shelf. Carrots and the long radishes stand up in a container with a damp paper towel around the bottoms. Here's the why. In plain words, a plant that's lying on its side is still alive, and it spends what little life it's got left trying to turn itself back upright. You've seen it. Asparagus curls. Green onions bend. That bending is the plant burning itself out. Stand it up, and it stops fighting. It just rests. My green onions go two weeks in a jar in the door. In the bag in the drawer, they went five days. It costs nothing. It takes up less room than the bag did too, because it's going up instead of sprawling across the drawer. Number nine. Toothpicks in the core. This is the one people don't believe me on until they try it. A head of cabbage or a head of lettuce. Take three or four plain toothpicks and push them straight into the core, the cut stem end, as far as they'll go. Wrap the head in a paper towel, put it in a bag, and put it in the drawer. A head of lettuce or cabbage is still growing after it's cut. All that growing happens at the core, and it feeds on the leaves to do it. That's why the outside leaves go limp and brown from the stem out. The toothpicks damage the core enough that it quits. The leaves stop getting eaten from the inside. I'll be honest with you about what it won't do. Toothpicks alone, with the head sitting bare in front of the cold air vent, that's not going to save it. It's the three things together. Toothpicks, paper towel, bag, and keep it out of the direct blast of cold. Do that and a half head of cabbage will go two weeks and still crunch. Mine does. By the way, habits like these, the small ones that cost nothing and save a grocery bag a month, I've got a whole book of them. Every method I use to run this house for less, written down in one place, It's on my website, links right under the video. Go grab it, I won't bring it up again. Number eight, freeze your rice hot. If you cook rice, you have thrown away rice. Everybody has. It goes in the fridge soft and comes out two days later hard as gravel. You microwave it and it's still gravel, only warm. Here's what I do now, and it's exactly how Keiko did it. The minute the rice is done, while it's still steaming, I scoop it out a cup at a time onto a square of plastic wrap. Flatten it to about an inch thick. Wrap it tight while the steam is still in there. Let the little packets sit on the counter till they're cool to the touch, then stack them flat in the freezer. The whole trick is the steam. Rice goes hard because it dries out. And the fridge is a drying box. When you wrap it hot, you seal that moisture in with it. To eat it, you leave the wrap on, poke a hole, and microwave about two minutes. It comes out like you just made it. I'm not exaggerating. My husband can't tell the difference. So now I cook a big pot once and I've got rice for two weeks, and not one grain of it has gone in the trash. Rice is cheap, but the trash can doesn't care how cheap it was. Number seven. Freeze mushrooms raw. Mushrooms are the worst offender in most fridges. You buy the carton for one meal, use half, and three days later the rest are slimy and you're pitching the whole carton. They're not cheap, either. Don't put them back in the fridge. Wipe them, slice them if you want, and put them straight in a freezer bag. Raw. Don't cook them first. Two things happen. One, they stop rotting, obviously. Two, and this is the part Keiko told me that I didn't believe till I tasted it, they come out tasting more like mushrooms than they went in. Freezing breaks them open a little on the inside, so when they hit the hot pan, more of that deep flavor comes out of them. Soup, gravy, a stir fry, anything cooked. Frozen mushrooms beat fresh ones for it. What they won't do is be a fresh mushroom again. They'll come out soft. You're not slicing these raw onto a salad. For anything that cooks though, you'll never buy mushrooms just to throw them out again. Number six, chop it before it dies and freeze the flavor. This is for the stuff that's $1.50 a bunch and you only ever need a little of. Green onions, ginger, garlic, parsley. Green onions, chop them small, dry them well, and put them in a lidded container with a folded paper towel laid in on top. Then flip the container upside down in the freezer. The paper towel soaks up the frost that would turn them into one solid green brick. Shake the container and they fall apart loose. A spoonful into soup, eggs, whatever. They keep about a month. Ginger. I grate the whole root the day I buy it and spread it a quarter inch thick in a freezer bag. Flat. Snap a piece off like a chocolate bar. Garlic the same way. Minced. A knob of ginger I used to buy and throw away three quarters of now lasts me two months and I never grate it again. The idea in all of this is the same. Keiko didn't store things in the shape they came from the store. She stored them in the shape she was going to use them. The fridge wasn't a warehouse. Everything in it was on its way somewhere. All right, that's six. And if you did nothing but those, you'd notice it on the receipt. The next four are the ones that take a fridge from less waste to pretty much none. Number four is the one I'd never heard of before her, and number one is the one you're going to argue with me about. Number five, the salt bag, the half cucumber, the last quarter of the cabbage. Two carrots and a nub of daikon. The little bits that aren't enough for a meal and die in the drawer waiting to be one. Slice them thin. Put them in a bag with about a teaspoon of salt for every couple cups of vegetable. Squeeze the bag around a minute until they go limp and wet. Push the air out, seal it, fridge. That's it. Keiko called it asazuke, which just means a quick pickle. I call it the salt bag. What the salt is doing is pulling the water out of the vegetables. Water is what everything that rots your food has to have to live. Take the water, and the rot has got nowhere to grow. Those scraps that had two days left now have a week. Easy. And you've made a side dish out of garbage. A squeeze of lemon, a splash of vinegar, a few sesame seeds if you've got them. We eat it with everything. They sell little jars of this at the store for $5. You just made it for a penny's worth of salt. Number four, bury it in miso. Stay with me. Miso is just fermented soybean paste. It's salty, it's thick, and a tub of it is $5 or $6 now at any grocery store, right there by the tofu. It'll sit in your fridge for a year and never go bad, because it is itself a thing that doesn't go bad. That's the whole point of it. Here's what I do with it. Chicken thighs that were going to have to be cooked tomorrow or thrown out. Pork chops, peeled hard-boiled eggs, a block of tofu, cucumber spears. I spread a thin layer of miso on them, bag them, and put them back. It's the salt again, pulling water, keeping rot away. But the miso does something salt alone won't. It Seasons the thing while it sits. Chicken that had a day left gets three or four more days, and it comes out of the pan tasting like something from a restaurant. Eggs sit in miso two days, and you've got the best snack in the house. Cucumbers go a week and a half. What it will not do is bring back meat that's already turned. If it smells off, it's off. Miso is for buying time on good food. It is not a rescue for bad food. Don't let anybody tell you different. Number three. The eat first tray and nothing hides. Every fridge has a back and in the back is where food goes to die because you can't see it and what you can't see you don't cook. Keiko's fridge had no back. I mean that. Everything was in clear containers and there was nothing stacked behind anything. You open the door and in one look you knew every single thing you owned. So I did two things. I threw out every colored cloudy container I had and went to clear ones. Deli containers, canning jars, whatever see-through. If you can't see it, you'll buy another one at the store, and now you've got two dying. And I put one tray, a cheap clear plastic one, front and center on the middle shelf. The eat-first tray. Anything opened, anything half-used, anything with a few days left goes on that tray. The half-onion. The opened sour cream. The three slices of ham. And dinner starts from the tray. Not from a recipe, not from a craving. I look at the tray first, and I cook what's on it. That one habit, honestly, might have cut my waist in half by itself. Food doesn't get thrown out because it was bad food. It gets thrown out because it got forgotten. The tray makes forgetting impossible. Number two. The scrap bag and the Sunday pot. Keiko made a pot of miso soup nearly every morning. And here's what I finally noticed about it. There was never a recipe. It was whatever was ending. Outer cabbage leaves, the mushroom stems, the top of a leek, a few cubes of tofu from the block that was on its third day. I don't make soup every morning. But I keep a gallon freezer bag in the freezer door. And every single trimming goes in it. Onion ends, carrot peels, celery tops, the stems off the broccoli, the chicken bones from Tuesday, the stalks off the herbs. When it's full, usually about once a week, it goes in a pot with water and simmers for an hour while I do something else. Strain it. That's your stock. Then the stock becomes the Sunday pot. Whatever's left on the eat-first tray goes in it. It's soup, or it's a stew, or it's a stir-fry with rice from the freezer. It's never the same twice, and nobody has ever complained. Those boxes of broth at the store run $3 and $4 a piece. I haven't bought one in years. I'm making it out of things I used to pay the garbage man to haul away. And while I'm at it, I eat the parts I used to peel off. Broccoli stems, peeled and sliced, are better than the tops. Radish greens, chopped and fried in a little oil and soy sauce, are a side dish. Carrot peels go in the bag. I throw out almost nothing that was once a plant. Number one, keep the fridge seven-tenths full. Pack the freezer tight. Here's where you're going to argue with me, because every instinct you've got says a full fridge is a well-stocked house. It's the opposite. A full fridge is a slow trash can. Keiko's rule, and I've since read it's about the standard rule over there, was that the fridge is never more than about 70% full. One-third of every shelf empty. The freezer is the reverse. You pack the freezer as full as it will go. The why is simple once somebody tells you. Your fridge isn't cold because the walls are cold. It's cold because cold air blows in from a vent and moves around. When you stuff it, the air can't move. The back corners go warm. The stuff behind the milk goes warm. Things die back there, and you don't know it until you smell it. A fridge you can see into, with room for air to move, keeps everything in it cold. And you can see everything in it, which is half the game. The freezer is different because frozen things keep each other frozen. A full freezer is a block of ice that barely has to work. Every time you open the door, a packed freezer hardly warms up. An empty one dumps all its cold out on the floor. But here's the real reason it's number one. You can't keep a fridge 70% full and shop the way we're taught to shop. You can't. Keiko shopped every two or three days. A small bag for the next few meals, and that was it. That sounds like more work until you realize you've stopped doing the other job, the one where you dig through the drawer every Saturday pitching slime into a bag. The empty space in the fridge is the whole system. It won't let you overbuy. You run out of room before you run out of money. Now follow the money on that for a second, because I've thought about it a lot. Who sold you the 26 cubic foot refrigerator? The appliance company, who will tell you bigger is a feature. Bigger is just a bigger place to lose things. Who sells you the buy two, get one free? The family pack of chicken, the warehouse club bag of spinach the size of a pillow. The grocery store does, and they know good and well that half of it's going in the trash. They don't make money off what you eat. They make money off what you buy. Those two numbers used to be about the same. They aren't anymore, and the gap between them is where that $3,000 went. And then once your food's rotting, somebody sells you the fix for that too. Green produce bags, little gadgets you put in the drawer, vacuum sealers, a special spray for the lettuce. None of it is a scam, exactly. It's just that nobody will ever sell you three toothpicks in a tray, because there's no money in it. Keiko ran a fridge half the size of mine. So, here's the one thing I want you to do tonight. Don't reorganize the whole fridge. Just open it, find the three things that are closest to dying, and put them on a tray on the front shelf where you'll see them when you open the door tomorrow. Cook from the tray. That's it. That's the start. Then tell me in the comments, what's the one thing you throw out most? For me, it was mushrooms. For years. I want to know what it is at your house, and if your grandmother had a trick for it, I want that too. I read every one of these. Next time I'm going to show you what I do with one whole chicken, start to finish, four meals, and a pot of stock out of a $6 bird. And the part most people throw away is the part I start with. Until then, keep the back of the fridge empty and the tray full. I'll see you then.