How To Store Fresh Vegetables For Months … Without A Refrigerator

If gardeners find spring and summer to be about growing food, they find fall and winter to be more about storing food. The fall season brings bountiful harvest from your own garden as well as inexpensive prices from local farmers’ markets. In winter months, prices on produce inevitably rise. So it makes sense to store as much as you can while fresh produce is bountiful and cheap.

One of the oldest – and easiest — ways to preserve fresh fruits and vegetables through the winter months is with cold storage, also known as root cellaring. In fact, historical records indicate that the aboriginal people of Australia were using the technique of burying food in the ground to preserve it more than 40,000 years ago, and walk-in root cellars started to become popular in England in the 17^th century.

What is a root cellar? A root cellar is simply an underground room used for preserving fruits and vegetables for several weeks or months. Many homes have them built into the basement, but they can also be structures separate from the home. The main features of these cellars is that they are cool in temperature, have an appropriate level of humidity and are well-ventilated.

Read more here.

Make your food last longer

By Lyndsey from Recycle for Wales

The easiest way to make food last for longer in our home is by freezing it. I usually make batches of food so I can be lazy in the week, and defrost it when I need it. Making a few small changes to how we store our food such as freezing it, making it into a jam etc can make it last longer. In the long run, this means we get to eat more of the food we buy, throw away less and save money. 

Here’s a few ideas, tips and recipes from the Love Food Hate Waste team to help you preserve your food.

Keep it cool – use your fridge

• Make sure your fridge is running below 5^OC. If your fridge is too warm favourites such as fish, chicken or salad won’t last as long as they could. These items will typically last for another 3 days if a fridge is running at 5^OC or lower.[1]
• Foods can be preserved fresher for longer by keeping them in their original packaging, in the fridge.  Much modern packaging has been specially designed to preserve fresh food and keep it at its best. Apples, oranges, carrots and peppers will all be better off and last much longer in your fridge.

Get friendly with your freezer

• The faster food freezes, the better the quality it will be. So larger amounts of food should be divided into smaller portions, packets or slices. This will also help with defrosting and also allows you to defrost precisely the number of helpings that that you want.
• Air trapped in packets can affect colour, taste and texture of food so wrap food well and expel any air before freezing. Tightly wrapping food well also prevents freezer burn (seen as dry, grey patches on frozen food).

Read more: http://www.wasteawarenesswales.org.uk/news/make-your-food-last-longer

Using glass for food storage

Using glass containers for food storage instead of plastic

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

When advocating glass containers for storing foods, including leftovers in the fridge, it always amazes me that most people today cannot think further than their wallet.

Invariably there will always be a number of people who will chip in that they would love to change from plastic containers to glass ones but that it is too expensive.

We seem to have become so orientated – or should I say brainwashed – towards consumption that even people wish to think of themselves as “green”, and as “homesteaders” even, cannot think further than buying.

Instead of looking at how much something we need or want costs we should first of all consider as to whether we can reuse or repurpose something for it or make it ourselves by means of upcycling or otherwise.

When it comes to glass containers for use to store food and leftovers I am sure everyone, like myself, has a fair number of glass jars coming into the home on a weekly basis filled with this or that, and in many different sizes; the ideal candidates for storage jars.

Far too many today cannot see, or so at least it would appear, further than their own noses and rather toss such jars into the recycling bin and then look at buying new jars in which to store food.

And then they say that they would like to change from plastic to glass but cannot see how they could afford it as glass is expensive.

I find it amazing that apparently so many people can no longer think straight like our parents and grandparents did. No glass jar from pickles, jam, mustard, etc. was ever thrown out. They would be used again and again. The attitude was – and they understood the fact – of our old ones was that they had paid for those jars in the purchase price and were going to put them to use, and that indeed they did.

The kitchen and the larder were full of different sized reused glass jars holding all manner of dry foods, etc., such as beans, peas, rice, pasta, flour, sugar, coffee, tea, you name it, and that was just in those two places, and as far as food storage goes.

Such glass jars also were employed to hold buttons and other things for sewing projects, seeds for the garden, nuts, bolts, screws, washers, and much, much more, and oh, candy (most important for a child).

Reuse of everything was the norm back then and that not just for glass jars. Biscuit tins, cigar boxes, show boxes and much more, all found a second or third use. But, since the last two decades of the twentieth century, or thereabouts, most seem to have lost this mindset and can only think of buying what they want and need.

© 2013

Love Food – Hate Waste (Food Storage)

by Michael Smith

According to statistics households in Britain throw away about a third (if not more, I would say) of all food that is being bought.

At times this has to do with the fact that people seem to see the “best before” date as a “throw before” date or definitely a “throw immediately on or after that date” date and hence lots of food gets thrown into the garbage that is entirely safe to eat still.

In other cases it is food, such as fruit and vegetables, that have rotted due to bad storage, such as bananas having been put into the fridge or other fruit having been kept in the same place with bananas. Bananas give off a gas that causes other fruit top ripen too fast and causes rot.

Often though food gets thrown that is still entirely safe to eat and is not even rotten. Potatoes are a case in point here. Many people thrown them because they have formed shoots. So what? That does not affect the food safety of the potato at all and does not render it inedible, though it would appear that a great majority of people think so.

In order to avoid potatoes, for instance, from sprouting and also from rotting prematurely, they must be stored away from light (that turns then green and does make them inedible) and in a dark and airy place.

Lakeland in the UK has produced a storage bag that fulfills this requirement but for those that wish not to make such a purchase all that is required is the good old-fashioned Hessian, burlap or canvass sack where to store the spuds in. That does as well the trick.

Potatoes also must be stored away from frost. Hence the reason in the old days – and this is still done by many a homesteader – they are stored in clamps, that is to say, in special covered trenched in the garden or fields. Carrots too and other root crops were stored – and still are – in such a way.

The greatest problem is that too many people nowadays are so far removed from reality that they no longer know how to store foods and also, it has to be said, and we have visited this subjects before, no longer know how to cook meals from scratch and especially also from and with leftovers.

Food storage, proper storage of the various types of produce, may be something that a book should be written about or even little course held about.

There, no doubt, is advice on this subject our there somewhere on the Internet but many people just do not really bother either.

With the credit crunch, with the looming depression, this might change and it is here where the big changes of grocery stores could come in with some advice cards of the likes that Sainsbury's are doing as regards to “feeding a family for a fiver” and the “Love your Leftovers” campaign they had for a while.

While some folks might not go out and buy a book on this subject or even download material free from the Internet if it would be available as a little card collection at supermarkets then, I am sure, people would take them and read them and, hopefully, also implement the advice.

Government departments and quangos such as WRAP themselves could produce little ring binders with information cards on this – and other waste related subjects – and distribute them free to the public. It is not rocket science.

People, the majority at least, I would say, need to relearn the proper storage of produce and also need to understand what the dates on labels mean and that, mostly, the date does not mean that the food must be thrown on or directly after that date, especially as far as canned food is concerned and produce safely sealed in glass jars. Unless the seal is popped, be this on a can or a glass jar then, generally, it is safe to open and eat.

The one thing that needs to be taken heed of is the fact that, ideally, even if stored sealed in a new container – as far as canned is concerned, as produce in glass jars can remain in its own container – should be used up – again depending on the kind of product – within 3 days to absolute maximum of a week, depending on what is being kept.

Pickled produce in glass jars is generally safe for much longer periods than other goods simply due to the way pickling preserves the product, whether this be gherkins or cabbage or other pickles.

© M Smith (Veshengro), January 2009
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