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Avoid Food Waste with Delicious Soups

Dec 30, 2022
A large silver-colored metal ladle full ofnoodles and small bits of vegetables.

Photo by Piotr Miazga on Unsplash

by Christine Muller

What to do with various leftovers? Be creative and prepare a delicious soup! You may find a small portion of broccoli or other vegetables in your refrigerator, perhaps potatoes from yesterday and some mushroom sauce from the day before … just mix them all up! All vegetables taste good together. Some leftover pasta sauce will add great flavor to your soup. Do you have a few tablespoons of cooked rice or pasta left from the other day? Just add them at the end of cooking your soup—especially when you start with fresh vegetables—so that they don’t get too soft. Leftover lentils are a special treat in soups. If you like your soup creamy, you may blend your leftovers together with water. 

For flavor, you may like to add organic chicken broth, or some leftover juice from when you recently baked chicken. When saving the juice after serving the chicken, pour it into a jar and refrigerate. The fat will move to the top and harden. When you use the juice, you can easily separate and discard the fat. An excellent vegetarian option is coconut milk. Its healthy fats add substance to the soup and together with soy sauce will make a yummy soup.

If you like, add some spices, fresh herbs, or minced garlic, and salt to taste. Bon appétit!

Why does it matter? One third of the food produced globally is never eaten. This is very troubling in a word where hunger is again on the rise. In addition, food waste is a major contributor to climate change because of the release of greenhouse gases by the conversion of land needed for agricultural production (deforestation), by its processing and transportation, as well as by its decomposition in a landfill. In addition, just imagine the waste of water for irrigation! While much of the food loss and waste is a systemic social problem, we can all help to reduce this problem by not wasting food in our own homes.

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Christine Muller, Teacher of Music and the Environment

Board Secretary, International Environment Forum

I was interested in environmental issues already at a young age and became a Bahá’í when I was 17, which was the beginning of a life-long study of the Bahá’í Faith. As the environmental crisis was worsening, I began to systematically study climate change at a time when not much information was easily available. I also searched the Bahá’í teachings for a spiritual solution to the climate crisis. At that time, climate change was not known to most people and there were no educational materials available. That’s why I wrote Scientific and Spiritual Dimensions of Climate Change – an Interfaith Study Course, which the International Environment Forum posted in 2009. I joined the Wilmette Institute as support faculty for its Sustainable Development course in 2011 and created its Climate Change course the following year. I also teach a course on climate change for the Environmental Sciences Department of the Baha’i Institute of Higher Education (BIHE) in Iran. I have served on the board of RI Interfaith Power&Light for more than a decade. In recent years, much of my time is spent serving the Bahá’í-inspired International Environment Forum (iefworld.org) as its secretary.  My formal academic background is in music, and I enjoy part-time piano teaching, playing and - when there is time - composing music. A recent composition is Humans on Earth – a Ballad of Our Time for two singers, string orchestra, piano, and percussion. Its lyrics include quotations from scientific sources and the Bahá’í Writings. Christine’s articles on BahaiTeachings.orgSee Faculty Bio

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