Cooking and eating at home, instead of going out for lunch or dinner, is an excellent and simple strategy for contributing to environmental sustainability. There are just a few simple rules to follow.

1. Choose healthy foods

Eating at home means limiting your consumption of processed foods in favour of more healthy dishes, which is beneficial for our health and the health of the environment!

2. Limit water waste

If you choose to eat at home, waste may be lurking just around the corner. For example, every year in every Italian home, litres and litres of water are used to boil pasta, yet we don’t need to fill the pot all the way to the top to cook a nice plate of spaghetti. Just this little trick can significantly reduce water consumption in the kitchen. 

3. No more packaging

Eating at home reduces the environmental impact of the packages use for shipping pre-cooked foods, which are often single-use plastic bags or trays that cannot be recycled or reused.

4. Reuse food scraps 

Eating at home also enables you to use food scraps, such as vegetable peels, which can be used in making soups or other recipes.

5. Reduce food waste

To eat at home, we need to pay attention to the deadlines on the labels in order to avoid throwing out food that is still edible. For example, there’s a big difference between the “expires on” and the “best before” indications. The first indicates the date by which the safety of fresh foods is guaranteed, whereas the second indicates the date by which the food retains its taste properties. After this date, there is no intoxication danger and the product can still be consumed; at worst, it may be less tasty.