How do I make groceries last the whole week without throwing food away?

Most of the week’s waste is water, cold in the wrong place, and a block of meat that cannot be dinner tonight. Five pages here fix one each.

Put a dry paper towel in the bag. A dry paper towel in the bag says leaves mostly do not spoil because time has passed; they spoil because they are sitting in water, the condensation that collects inside any sealed bag in a fridge. Greens want humid air and dry surfaces, and the towel removes only the wet surfaces. Change it when it goes damp. The page also retires a tip you may have heard, pick the flattest bag of salad: how full a bag looks is a property of how it was packed and shipped, not of age, and people who work with the stuff said the reverse can be true. Look for water beading on the plastic instead. Herbs stand in a glass of water like cut flowers; carrots keep for over a month submerged in water in a closed jar; keep fruit away from leaves, because some fruit gives off ethylene as it ripens. Limp greens come back in cold water; slimy or off-smelling ones do not.

Bread belongs in the freezer, not the fridge. Bread belongs in the freezer says refrigerating bread slows mould and speeds staling, drying a loaf to cardboard within about a day. The freezer nearly stops that, and frozen slices go straight into the toaster and come out better than thawed ones. Counter for the next few days, freezer for anything longer, the fridge for neither. And if you get through a loaf in a week anyway, ignore all of it. While the door is open: a few days in a properly cold freezer when a new bag of rice or flour comes home deals with weevil eggs that can arrive with it; it prevents, it does not cure.

Flatten the meat before you freeze it. Flatten the meat before you freeze it is about the brick of frozen mince that will not be dinner for another day. Split it into meal-sized portions and press each flat in a freezer bag; a sheet the thickness of a paperback thaws in the fridge in a few hours or in cold water in well under an hour, and never spends time in the danger zone. Its safety line comes from the accounts and public food-safety guidance alike: never thaw meat or poultry on the counter or anywhere at room temperature, in warm or hot water, or in the dishwasher, and never put a frozen or partly frozen turkey into a deep fryer.

Float the egg, then smell it. Float the egg, then smell it says ten conversations drop a past-date egg in cold water: fresh sinks, old floats. The correction the accounts made in each other: floating means old, not bad, because the air pocket has grown with age. Crack it and smell it; a spoiled egg smells so foully of sulphur you will not need to wonder. Two lines sit above the test. The smell test is not for an infant, someone ill or someone elderly, and US and UK food-safety guidance adds the reason: salmonella has no smell, so for those people the egg is cooked until white and yolk are firm whatever the bowl said. And US eggs are washed and must stay cold; UK eggs are not.

Frozen fruit is picked ripe. Frozen fruit is picked ripe treats the bag in the freezer as the fruit, not the compromise: picked at its ripest and frozen within hours, cheaper than out-of-season fresh, and it does not turn to fur in the drawer on Thursday. Blend it, cook it, or stir it into hot oats, the places where texture does not matter. The page’s honest exception: near a growing region or in season, fresh can be far cheaper, so compare price per weight in your own shop.

Who this is not for. If food is running out rather than going off, the library’s answer on having no money for groceries is the door, and the frozen-fruit page’s own decider applies to everything here: the waste to avoid is food spoiling uneaten, so if you eat it all in a week, none of these habits owes you anything.