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The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 3: Real Food on a Budget. We’re dedicating this season to discussing an aspect of natural healing that often gets left out of the conversation: affordability. We’ll be chatting with experts and peers from the AIP community about how to best balance money with your health priorities.

This season is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association (NTA), a holistic nutrition school that trains and certifies nutritional therapy practitioners and consultants with an emphasis on bioindividual nutrition. Learn more about them by visiting NutritionalTherapy.com, or read about our experiences going through their NTP and NTC programs in our comparison article.

Season 3 Episode 6 is not just about a clever way to maximize your food budget, but one of the biggest struggles our culture faces when it comes to sustainable food production: reducing food waste.

We are discussing how to make the most of all the ingredients we’ve talked about sourcing in the previous episodes so you can best minimize waste and reuse leftovers. Our guest is Rachael Bryant from the blog Meatified, who shares some excellent advice and personal experience around creating a low-waste kitchen. Scroll down for the full episode transcript!

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Full Transcript:

Mickey Trescott: Welcome to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, a resource for those seeking to live well with chronic illness. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’m the author of The Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt. I’m a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I’m the author of The Alternative Autoimmune Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage my endometriosis, lichen sclerosis, and Celiac disease.

After recovering our health by combining the best of conventional medicine with effective and natural dietary and lifestyle interventions, Mickey and I started blogging at www.AutoimmuneWellness.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

We also wrote a book called The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook together that serves as a do-it-yourself guidebook to living well with chronic illness.

Mickey Trescott: If you’re looking for more information about the autoimmune protocol, make sure to sign up for our newsletter at autoimmunewellness.com, so we can send you our free quick start guide. It contains printable AIP food lists, a 2-week food plan, a 90-minute batch cooking video, a mindset video, and food reintroduction guides.

This season of the podcast, real food on a budget is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association.

Angie Alt: A quick disclaimer: The content in this podcast is intended as general information only, and is not to be substituted for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Onto the podcast!

Topics:

1. Ways to reduce waste [4:23]

2. Food storage methods [12:52]

3. Our guest, Rachael Bryant from Meatified [22:44]

4. Reimagining leftovers [29:30]

5. Using food “scraps” [39:23]

Angie Alt: Hi everyone! Angie here. Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, season 3. How are you doing today, Mickey?

Mickey Trescott: I’m doing great. Cozied up here on kind of a cool day. Ready for some warmer weather in the Pacific Northwest.

Angie Alt: Oh, gosh. Me too. I feel like it’s the longest winter. Which is ridiculous, because it really hasn’t been that bad. But I’m really ready for the sun.

Mickey Trescott: Me too.

Angie Alt: Ok. Today we’re continuing our discussion related to the topic this season; real food on a budget. This episode is going to be about how to make the most out of all of the ingredients we’ve talked about sourcing in the previous episodes. It’s all about minimizing waste, and reusing leftovers.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. So after we figured out how to get our hands on all of these really well-sourced, healthy, nutrient dense, and sometimes a little bit expensive ingredients, depending on kind of how we’ve sourced. We have to figure out how we’re going to maximize them, and use every last bit.

So, you guys. We as a culture have a really massive problem with food waste. I looked up a couple of stats, and globally we waste 1.3 trillion tons of food per year. Which, that is just insane. And it’s estimated that up to 50% of food that’s produced; that’s either meat that’s raised or produce that’s grown, or processed food that’s made, is not even eaten. So, I don’t know how that makes you guys feel, but I feel kind of disgusted by that.

Angie Alt: Yeah, it makes mew ant to cry, to be honest. Especially; my experience living in developing countries and everything and seeing this problem. In the United States we have a particularly bad problem with food waste. So much so that our government even has an initiative to try to reduce it by the year 2020, I believe. I have to check in on that and read that again.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, I think it’s 30% by 2030.

Angie Alt: 30% by 2030. Ok. Yeah, when I reflect on all of that, it’s literally heart breaking for me. And I kind of have a little bit of a problem about it.

Mickey Trescott: Part of it is within the food system. Part of that food isn’t even being purchased. So a lot of it is wasted in the field. Maybe because of the timing of harvesting, or the market, or in the factory where they process food, or whatever. But we have a lot of angles to tackle this. And the on that we are most poised to handle is actually in our own homes, and our kitchens, and how we waste food through the course of planning and cooking our meals every day.

Angie Alt: Right. We could make a big impact. If we each did that, it would be huge!

1. Ways to reduce waste [4:23]

Mickey Trescott: Today we’re going to talk in this first segment of this episode about some ways that we can reduce waste. And so the first one; we’re going to sound like a broken record, guys. But planning. Planning is really key. Right Angie?

Angie Alt: Yep. Meal planning all the way. I know we’ve talked about it like 800 times this season, you guys. But it’s absolutely key.

Mickey Trescott: You know, meal planning; Angie’s a little more of a meal planner than I am. But I do know that when I make a meal plan, what I tend to do is take inventory of what I have and when it expires. How I can use it up before it goes bad. And then also making a list of what to buy. I’m not just wandering around the grocery store being like; oh, these Brussel sprouts look good. I have a list, and I know exactly the quantities that I need. And that first act of meal planning; it organizes all of that into a plan that I can follow. And I’m much less likely to have waste at the end of it.

Angie Alt: Yep. Really the smart way to go. And you can pay attention to what’s in your deep freeze, and what’s in your pantry before you go so that you don’t end up with doubles of things and then some of it going bad because you forgot what you had available. It’s just really the smart way to go in terms of planning.

The next step that kind of goes along with meal planning is batch cooking. Which we’ve talked about before. Mickey does a little more batch cooking than I do. We’re kind of opposite in that way. I do a little more meal planning and a little less batch cooking; she does more batch cooking and less meal planning. But this is kind of the next important step in trying to reduce waste at home.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. When you batch cook, you’re using a larger quantity of ingredients. So I find if I make a batch of chili I might use one or two whole yellow onions, for example. Where if I’m making like a one-off meal, that’s not a big batch, I might use a quarter or half of an onion. And then that onion is sitting in my fridge.

Or, if I have a bag of carrots, I might use the whole bag of carrots in a batch cook versus a couple of carrots and then having the rest of them potentially go bad. So, through batch cooking you can make a bunch of food. And then whatever you’re not going to eat in the next few days, you can just freeze immediately. So you can really visually see; ok, all of those ingredients that I bought have been turned into meals. Which are perfectly portioned. I can visualize them in the fridge. And then whatever I’m not going to use, I can freeze either immediately or if I get a couple of days in, maybe I unexpectedly eat out and I don’t need one of those meals. Guess what? Pop it in the freezer. You know? It’s a really easy way to kind of get a handle on that whole meal situation.

Angie Alt: Right. The next topic in terms of reducing waste is how you shop, right?

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. And if you meal plan, or batch cook, or both, I think that can really inform your shopping in a way that, like I said before, avoids impulse buys. When I’m doing more meal planning, I’m definitely going right for the things I’m looking for. And I’m buying exactly what I need. So like I was talking about with the carrots; if I only need a couple of carrots for a recipe and I have all my meals planned for the week, I know that that bag of carrots, unless I’m maybe going to want to be eating carrots as a snack with some pate or something, I’m not really going to need that whole bag. So I might just go for the bulk carrots and get a couple.

Same thing with beets. I might get one beet for a chili instead of getting a whole bunch of beets. So I don’t know if you have any experiences like that, but getting exactly what you need is definitely the way to prevent waste from happening.

Angie Alt: Yeah, for sure. In fact; my husband and I always have a little bit of a disagreement here. Because if I send him out to shop, he’s the guy going out to get the bounty for the family, right, and he buys whatever. If I say, buy apples. I’ll say 4, and he’ll buy 8. {laughs}

Mickey Trescott: Just in case.

Angie Alt: Yeah, just getting the most in case. So I really pay close attention to the numbers we need, and what we can go through realistically in a week so that there’s no waste.

Mickey Trescott: Or even if there’s a trip coming up. Something that happens a lot in our household. We’ll go out of town for a few days. Which is, you know, not really long enough to have to completely clear your fridge. But it is long enough to where a lot of things don’t last for a few days. And if we do a shop a couple of days before we go out of town, I have to tell my husband; hey. We need to not buy a huge thing of bananas. {laughs} Those are not going to last. So just thinking ahead a little bit with that shopping is really important.

Angie Alt: Right. I think you had some tips, too, Mickey about fridge organization when you’re bringing home all of those groceries. How do you arrange?

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, so it can be really tempting to put all of that new, fresh stuff kind of throw it right in the front and throw it on top of what’s there. But that’s kind of how things get buried. So, even the way that you organize your fridge and the way that you put your ingredients away can affect how you use them.

Something that I do; I have a very small fridge, so I have to really maximize the way that I use the space. But I only have one drawer, and that’s where I keep all my produce. So what I’ll do is I’ll pull out the drawer, and I’ll put out anything that’s aged in there. And then I’ll put all of the brand new stuff right in the bottom, and I’ll put the stuff that’s older on top so that when I go into the fridge, I see it. And I remember; ok, I need to use those greens up. Or those mushrooms are ready to go. So everything at the top is kind of the priority. And those oldest items are kind of the most visible.

Angie Alt: Right. Super smart.

Mickey Trescott: If you guys have done some reintros, and you’re eating a little bit more of some of the packaged perishables. These might be things like eggs, or yogurt, or things that you’re going to be going through more frequently. There aren’t a lot of those things on the elimination phase. But when you reintroduce foods, that might become an option for you. A good thing is just to make sure that you rotate those.

So like when I buy eggs, I don’t want to put the new eggs on the top. Because then the eggs that are below it might not get eaten in time. So that’s another way to think about it.

Angie Alt: Yeah, I totally do that too. How about using up all the fresh ingredients before you go shopping again? How do you make sure you do this? I know how we approach it in our house. How do you do it in your house, Mickey?

Mickey Trescott: You know, we do kind of a fridge dump soup. And something actually going back to batch cooking; I always have batch cooked meals in the freezer available. So when we end up on that last meal, sometimes it’s not literally the last meal. Sometimes I can do a fridge dump soup, which is basically every vegetable or meat that’s in the fridge. I just figure out how to make a soup with that with some broth and some spices. That’s a way to use up all the perishables. And if we’re not literally going to the store that day, I can get us by one more meal with what I have in the freezer. That’s kind of how we do it, making sure all those perishables are totally eaten through.

And sometimes, it’s like a game. Sometimes it’s really fun to kind of figure out; “What can I make with a sweet potato, some broth, and some leftover chicken.” You know?

Angie Alt: Yeah. I actually kind of like that feeling. And it makes my daughter kind of crazy, but we definitely use everything, right down to the very last. My fridge is literally empty. My pantry, other than bulk stuff like maybe some cassava flour is literally empty. We use everything before we go and shop again. And if I have those weird odds and ends, yeah I love the challenge of kind of coming up with that last meal before you shop that’s all the weird stuff. That’s a good feeling to use it up.

I usually will try to make a little bit of a baked something. A little bit of a casserole type thing. Or some kind of a hash with those last bits.

2. Food storage methods [12:52].

Angie Alt: Another important part of reducing waste is storing food correctly, and I think a lot of people might not know about some of these options. And I think, especially in the US. We probably tend to throw stuff out too soon thinking that it’s gone bad. And really, if we would have taken just a little care with storing the food, it would have lasted for a long time.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, there are lots of resources online for you guys, if you’re really curious about storing food. I think Angie and I tend to be on the less conservative side. As far as meat and leftovers and stuff, I would totally agree with Angie. I definitely let my leftovers go sometimes up to a week and it’s fine. Sometimes it needs a little refresh with maybe some new spices and add some different flavors, a sauce or something. But I have no problem eating leftovers. Which I know we’ll talk about in a little bit.

But some things that you guys can do to kind of make the food that you buy last longer; a trick that I learned with herbs. Like fresh cilantro, fresh parsley, fresh basil. The best way to keep those is actually to put them in a little glass or jar of water, kind of like you would a flower arrangement. And then cover them with a plastic bag and kind of tie it tight so they both have that water and a little humidity. It will kind of keep them alive. Because you know how quickly those herbs can go wilty and slimy. They’re so flavorful, and so important in AIP cooking, that I just like to snip a little bit to use in a recipe, and then kind of keep the rest of them alive.

Some things that you might not be aware of actually last a lot longer in the refrigerator. So, while avocados you’re going to want to keep on the counter if you’re...