Even if you’ve spent the entire year cutting down on plastic, eating less red meat, and conserving water, you’re probably poised to have a wasteful Thanksgiving. It’s the nature of the holiday. We eat a lot, and that means we create a lot of garbage—and throw away a lot of food.
This year can be different. Here’s a step-by-step guide to minimizing your turkey day trash.
Step one: The Planning Phase
This should not come as a shock. As with most things, planning is key. But what should you prioritize when plotting a no-waste feast?
Know who’s coming, what they want, and how much they’ll eat. Unfortunately, having an open-house-style party isn’t the best option for cutting down on waste. Kick off your eco-conscious holiday by pinning down a guest list, stat. Then text or call everyone to ask what three or four foods they most want to eat. The dishes that get a shout out from more than three-quarters of your expected guests are the ones you should make. (Obviously, whoever is cooking gets veto power. But if no one else is interested in eating all five of your favorite foods, maybe you should just pick one or two of them.)
A firm guest count allows you to plan portions, which is where most Thanksgiving dinners really go off the rails. We want to create the perfect picture of a table veritably buckling with the bounty of this year’s harvest, but that often means making more food than we need.
If you want a quick and easy way to plot out the proper number of servings for each of your dishes, check out the Natural Resources Defence Council’s “Guest-imator” tool. This widget lets you enter the number of guests you expect (divided into appetite categories for added precision) and the types and number of dishes you hope to make, then spits out recommended servings for each recipe.
This might sound crazy, but consider ditching the turkey. Most chefs recommend a pound of turkey per guest. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a bird smaller than 10 pounds or so in your local grocery store, so smaller family gatherings are bound to end up with way too much meat. If you’re expecting fewer than a dozen people, consider some alternatives to a whole bird. You could make a stuffed turkey breast, spatchcock and roast a chicken instead, go with another sort of meat entirely, or go totally meat free—the sides are the best part, anyway!
Assuming you don’t swap the turkey for a giant piece of red meat, you’re almost certainly going to make your meal more environmentally friendly if you don’t gobble a gobbler.
To read the full story, visit https://www.popsci.com/no-food-waste-thanksgiving-guide.