Guelph Family Health Study launches cookbook to help families reduce household food waste

September 27, 2019

This guest post comes courtesy of the Guelph Family Health Study.

Canadian families are wasting more food than they realize. Research conducted by the Guelph Family Health Study (GFHS) and the Guelph Food Waste Research Group suggests that families with young children waste almost 3 kg of edible food each week which costs them over $1000/year. Of this avoidable waste, the majority is fruits and vegetables, which is troubling because most Canadians are not eating enough of them.

While the statistics are concerning, the good news is that families can take simple steps to prevent food waste. To help, researchers from the GFHS partnered with the Helderleigh Foundation, George Brown Food Innovation and Research Studio (FIRSt) and the Guelph Food Waste Research Group to create a cookbook full of recipes and tips to help families prevent food waste and eat better. Love Food Hate Waste Canada, an initiative of The National Zero Waste Council also generously contributed to the project.

The cookbook provides tips for meal planning, food storage and using food up, and the recipes were created with an eye to using up food before it spoils and using the whole food, from top to bottom. Whether families have a busy schedule, a picky eater, or a lack of enthusiasm for leftovers, the recipes and tips in this book will help them use up the foods they buy before they go bad!

This recipe book is the fifth installment in the GFHS cookbook series. Keeping busy families in mind, the recipes are not only tasty, but quick and easy to prepare. The cookbook also features fun instructional videos demonstrating how to prepare some of the recipes.

Look for the Rock What You’ve Got: Recipes for Preventing Food Waste cookbook and instructional videos FREE on the GFHS website: https://guelphfamilyhealthstudy.com/cookbooks/.