Changing decades of habits isn’t easy, even when it comes to food. For much of our life together, I did the cooking for Nigel and me, and for our last fifteen years or so I did nearly all of it. That meant I built habits to make that easier, and to ensure we didn’t run out of things.
Running out of things—hooboy! Nigel’s breakfasts nearly ruined us. He might get grumpy with me if we ran out of margarine to put on his morning toast (he could use butter…), but if we ran out of peanut butter, I might need to plan on moving out. I’m exaggerating, obviously, but for many, many years he had the same breakfast nearly every morning on work days (and sometimes on weekends): Toast with margarine, peanut butter, and strawberry jam. Sometimes I made it for him, but he often made it for himself—and he let me know his displeasure if we ran out of one of the ingredients.
So, I started having not merely one margarine container in reserve, I often had two. Similarly, I always had at least one unopened peanut butter jar on hand in addition to the open one, and when I noticed the open one was getting low, I’d buy a new jar so that there’d still be one in reserve. I learned and improved—from Nigel’s perspective, anyway. Jam tended to last longer, but we usually had one unopened jar in reserve.
Everything changed when Nigel died—everything except my buying habits. I kept making sure I had two tubs of margarine in the fridge, and at first it was because I was on autopilot, but as post-Covid prices soared, I started buying a new reserve one when they were on special—but that sometimes means I have two in reserve, which even I know is stupid. Peanut butter is different: I only ever have one in reserve, and I’ve even run out a time a two, but that’s also how I ended up with extra peanut butter when Nigel died: I had two in reserve and the opened one. I think that underscores how quickly my life unravelled, and may it even point to why it took me so long to change my ways to meet my new reality.
And that brings me to carrots.
I had a years-long habbit of buying bags of fresh carrots (1.5kg) because, back then, it was cheaper than buying a few at a time, and because we went through them reasonably quickly. I kept buying those bags, and I kept doing that once I was alone. However, the carrots would frequently start to rot or become mummified before I could use them all. This was not good, and I knew it: The media and my local council often tried get us to reduce food waste, but there I was, a poster child for wasting food. This shame could not remain unaddressed.
My first thing attempt at self-improvement was to switch to buying a few carrots at a time, since the unit price (the price per kilogram or gram) was similar to the larger bags. However, I kept running out of carrots, and if I bought more, the old problems returned. There simply had to be another and better way!
So, I did what any self-respecting Digital Immigrant would do: I googled “best way to store carrots”, or similar, and may even have added “NZ”, though I don’t remember for sure. At any rate, I ended up on a New Zealand site, “Love the Food, Hate the Waste”. There, I read that globally, one-third of all food is lost or wasted,” which is pretty abyssmal, and I bet it’s much higher in at least some developed countries. The site adds that food waste “has a profound environmental impact and is the third-largest contributor to global carbon emissions.” Yikes.
Fortunately, their site also had information on how to store carrots (summarised in the graphic below). I took it to heart immediately, and pulled out a small airtight container, and I bought a few fresh carrots to put in it, and they were perfect to the very last one.
Next, I bought a 1.5kg bag of Woolworth’s “The Odd Bunch” carrots, which are called that because they’re considered “imperfect” because they’re too small, too big, too misshapen. I buy a lot of “Odd Bunch” produce primarily because it keeps them out of landfill, but they’re also a bit cheaper: 1.5kg bag of “The Odd Bunch: carrots is currently $3.10 ($2.07/kg) while the “normal” bags of the same size are $4.29 ($2.86 per kg). The middle price would be for loose carrots, which are currently $2.59/kg. So, buying “The Odd Bunch” bag is cheapest, but, more importantly, it may help reduce food waste, too.
I then bought a larger NZ-made plastic container (at left in the photo above), which was able to store a 1.5kg bag of carrots, though I bet sometimes that may be harder than other times (the carrots I buy aren’t uniform in size or shape, after all). However, I could get away with keeping a few carrots stored less ideally for a short time, so Im not worried about this potential problem actually being a problem.
I’ve been using the new system for several weeks now with no complaints—in fact, I no longer have rotting or mummified carrots. That’s good news in itself, but it reminds me, yet again, that there’s always a solution to challenges if I look for them. Sometimes I just need to realise I need to look for a solution. Carrots showed me a way that can change.
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