How To Use Pinterest To Reduce Food Waste

Do you ever use Pinterest to reduce food waste in your kitchen? Check out my little life hack using food blogger recipes from Pinterest to help ensure we reduce food waste in our home!

Whenever I have new, unusual, or forgotten ingredients that I need to use up, I always head two Pinterest to find new recipes to try. (Side note: If you love Pinterest, you should follow me over there!)

Whenever I have an ingredient to use up and I’m not quite sure how to finish it, I use the search function in Pinterest and simply type in [ingredient] recipes. This little trick seems a bit obvious in hindsight, but it’s a go-to habit for me that really helps prevent food waste in our home.

I definitely do this when I’m trying to use up a single ingredient, but the volume of the results can be a bit overwhelming depending on how common the ingredient is. Pinterest always has something delicious using whatever ingredients I’m looking to spare from my compost bin. There are so many amazing recipes from food bloggers for just about any ingredients I can buy!

Using Pinterest to reduce food waste really works magic when I have a couple of ingredients to use up. I find this to be Pinterest’s sweet spot. I don’t always have time or space in our weekly meal plans to make a special meal or dish with every single ingredient I’m trying to use up.

Instead, I search for recipes to use items together! This is my favorite way to find great recipes on Pinterest.

For example, when I was looking to use up pears and ginger recently, I searched “pear ginger recipe” on Pinterest. This pear gingerbread crumb cake that I made was a perfect example of a Pinterest win! Not only did I find a delicious recipe using up all of our pears and some of the ginger from our Misfits Market box, but I also executed on something I actually pinned to a Pinterest board (which might be worth a celebration on its own) and ended up with a tasty cake and zero food waste.

It never ceases to amaze me how many amazing recipes I find on Pinterest using this lifehack. Food bloggers recipes are the best, and Pinterest is much better than Google at helping me find them.

For a while, I used Google to search for recipes. But recently, Google seems to return more results from big publication websites when food bloggers recipes are often more up my alley.

At least in my experience, many food bloggers offer awesome recipes that use fun ingredients in ways that are family-friendly and also achievable with my very average kitchen skills. Some of the major publishing sites like Bon Appetit, Good Housekeeping, and Martha Stewart too often return recipes that are too fancy and use tools or skills out of my wheelhouse.

So, I’m all about giving the food bloggers my kitchen love. And Pinterest is definitely the best way to do this.

Using Pinterest to prevent food waste isn’t rocket science. However, I feel like it’s something that may only seem hilariously obvious once someone says it out loud. I mean, really, who immediately thinks about Pinterest as a solution to reducing food waste in our country.

I’ve made a lot of recipes from Pinterest. Many have turned out quite well. A few have been epic fails. But I’m pretty sure this pear gingerbread crumb cake has been one of my biggest wins, especially because I was using ingredients that were pretty new to me and I wasn’t entirely sure where I was headed.

I’d love to know, what is the best recipe or biggest kitchen success you’ve had lately. Bonus points if it helped to reduce food waste in your home!