Scientist Brittany Towers Lewis explains why cutting your kitchen food waste is linked to how you put it away in the first place. For more tips from CNN’s series on how to make food last longer, watch this video next.

Food scientist Brittany Towers Lewis discusses the importance of proper food storage in reducing kitchen waste and extending the freshness of groceries. She explains that factors such as time, oxygen, moisture, and light all contribute to food spoilage, and that improper storage can lead to significant waste, which also has environmental consequences.

Lewis provides specific tips for storing common foods: potatoes should be kept in a cool, dark, breathable environment and away from ethylene-producing fruits like bananas; salad leaves last longer if rinsed, dried, and stored with a paper towel; and herbs can be preserved by trimming the stems and placing them in water in the refrigerator. These strategies help slow spoilage, reduce waste, and save money.

Food scientist explains how to stop your groceries going bad

The kitchen, the heart of our homes and fortress for our fresh food. Taking pride of place, these gleaming apples and bananas might look safe now. But when you open the fridge or cupboards a few days later, you can find your once fresh ingredients in a very different condition. And this often comes down to how you put them away in the first place. A lot of food is wasted. People buy in bulk and then end up not eating it. So much food, in fact, that if food loss and waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases. To keep food for longer, and help the planet and your household budget in the process, there are a few things to keep in mind. One is time. So obviously the longer you keep something, it will eventually go bad. Oxygen. There's a lot of reactions that happen if you've heard of oxidation that kind of causes apples to go brown, for example, when you cut them. Moisture can increase microbial growth, which is something that we want to prevent because obviously bacteria, moulds, light can also cause foods to spoil a little faster. Like potatoes, if they're exposed to light, they can turn green. They produce sprouts, for example. So to avoid waking up to potatoes like this, you should keep them in a cool, dark place, in a breathable bag to avoid moisture, and away from fruits such as bananas. This is because bananas are climacteric foods, which means they produce a lot of ethylene. Ethylene, very fancy term. It's a gas that causes fruits and vegetables to ripen. That's why a lot of times when people are like, hey, you want to ripen something, put it in a bag with a banana, because bananas produce a lot of ethylene. So it'll cause it to ripen faster. Salad leaves are another victim of bad storage, resulting in this all-too-familiar kitchen scene. If you notice kind of your leaves aren't lasting as long, a really great way is to rinse them off and make sure they're completely dry. Vinegar not only will help kill or monitor bacteria, but it's also very acidic. So most bacteria also don't like acidic environments. And remember the role moisture plays? Bacteria love water, and that's what they use to grow. So the more water you try to take out, the longer that they'll last. So if you put a little paper towel in, keep it in your refrigerator, that will help keep the lettuce a little longer. But when it comes to herbs, a little H2O used correctly goes a long way. If you cut the bottom stem part off and kind of put them in some water in your refrigerator, that can help keep them a little longer. They're like a living plant, so they're in their little water and they're drinking it up. Instead of in like a bag from the grocery store, that kind of just like harbors just bacteria because everything's like stuck together.

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