By Derek Markham / Source: TreeHugger

food-waste

The new Food Keeper app from the USDA and Cornell University aims to help you cut food waste at home.

How do you know if the food in your pantry or fridge is still good to eat or if it needs to be composted? The sell-by date isn’t a great indicator of freshness, and the sniff test is only as good as your nose, so what’s a cook to do? I wasn’t going to lead off this article by saying there’s an app for that, but I guess I just did anyway.

Food waste is a huge issue in this country, with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimating that about 21% of food goes uneaten “at the consumer level” and about 36 pounds of food per person per month gets wasted, which all adds up to a massive amount of energy, water, and labor being squandered every year. And lest you think that food waste is more of an institutional and food system issue, the USDA notes that “food waste from households represents about 44% of all food waste generated in the U.S.”

And one of the reasons for that waste could be ridiculously simple to address, because it turns out that many people may not know how store food properly at home, and don’t know how to identify which foods have gone bad and which are still edible.To help address this issue, a new app from the USDA, Cornell University, and the Food Marketing Institute, takes aim at food waste that occurs due to home cooks not being sure about the safety or quality of food.

The FoodKeeper app tries to help users understand how different food storage methods can affect a food’s shelf life in order to maximize the storage life of foods at home, and offers advice on food storage for more than 500 foods and beverages.

The app allows users to find product-specific food storage timelines for foods stored in the pantry, freezer, and refrigerator, as well as offering cooking tips for meat, seafood, and poultry items. Users can also put the app to work as a reminder, with a function for adding notes with the dates the foods are purchased, coupled with a notification feature to remind users “when they are nearing the end of their recommended storage date” so they get eaten, not tossed.

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