With food prices in May this year than May 2021, many people are looking for ways to save money in the kitchen.
In 2020 and 2021, a team of UNBC students in Prince George developed a free online course to help people save money – and the planet – by cutting food, plastic and other waste in the kitchen. Their timing couldn’t be better.
The Eco Living Kitchen initiative came out the Fraser Basin Council’s Co-Creating a Sustainable BC program.
“The kitchen is a space that involved a lot of consumption. It’s a space that also produces a lot of waste,” Eco Living Kitchen outreach coordinator Helga Holler-Busch said. “When it comes to food waste, we need to plan our meals very carefully. We need to go back to the mindset our grandparents or great-grandparents had… when it comes to tolerating things that don’t look perfect. If there is a spot on that apple on the counter, cut out the brown spot and throw it in a cobbler. That milk in the fridge that has reached its expiry date… you can still use it in coffee.”
The Eco Living Kitchen team, made up of Holler-Busch, Ann Duong, Shauna Kelly and Hannah Lawrence, developed a series of seven 60 to 90-minute workshops on topics including meal planning and shopping smart; reducing, reusing and recycling in the kitchen; growing your own food, even in a small space; composting; sustainable hunting and fishing; fermenting and preserving food; and using food scraps to make tasty, healthy dishes. Videos of the workshops are available on
Eco Living Kitchen also shares tips and information on their and channels, Holler-Busch said.
Eco Living Kitchen’s top three tips for reducing food waste are:
- Meal plan and use that to inform your shopping list. Don't buy too much of any one thing.
- Make large dishes like chili, Dahl, casseroles and soup that can be frozen and used for more than one dinner.
- Organize your fridge according to what needs to be eaten first. This works well if you have snackers in your household. Have a special bin for things that need to be eaten/cooked first.
Cutting down on the use of single-use plastics like plastic bags, plastic food wrap and straws is good for the Earth, and can save money in the long-run, Holler-Busch said.
“Those Ziplock (bags) are reusable, if you wash them out and aren’t using them for raw meat all the time,” Holler-Busch said. “You can reuse a lot of food packaging.”
There are a lot of reusable kitchen products on the market now like metal straws, metal tea balls instead of one-use tea bags and reusable food wrap, she said, but purchasing them means a large up-front investment. In addition to keep single-use plastics out of the landfill, the reusable products do save money over the long-term.
“Beeswax wraps are very popular right now, and are easy to make,” Holler-Busch added. “There is lots of tutorials available online.”
In addition to developing the online workshop, Eco Living Kitchen hosted a series of Cooking on Campus events where professional chefs would come to the UNBC campus and teach students how to prepare a meal. The students would prepare the meal alongside the chef, and then eat together.