This text is part of the special Plaisirs booklet
The zero waste expert and eco-entrepreneur Florence-Léa Siry publishes Zero waste challenges, a fifth book to help consumers reduce food waste in the home. Offering advice and recipe templates, she challenges everyone.
The idea of writing a fifth book about food waste comes to her following the challenge she launched herself last January. “Every day, I cooked with an ingredient accumulated in the previous weeks,” says Florence-Léa Siry. Her goal was to get her followers to take part in the challenge and think about how we consume food. Result: She reached over a million people on Facebook during her challenge. It just goes to show that consumer interest in reducing food waste is great.
“I identified the most frequent questions and I designed my recipes based on the ingredients targeted in the comments, such as knowing what to do with the different types of flour that we accumulate,” she explains.
For readers to find their way around, each chapter of the book Zero waste challenges covers a storage area: the counter, the refrigerator, the pantry and the freezer. It then presents three stages: evaluate, organize and invent. Concretely, it invites readers to assess their consumption habits and the reasons why they waste certain foods. Then, she presents tips for better planning your purchases, better preservation of food and, above all, the different ways of consuming them to considerably reduce food waste.
From there, his recipe templates. Since we don’t all have the same ingredients lying around in the fridge or pantry, Florence-Léa Siry offers recipes “in which you are the hero”. For example, it indicates the amount of sweetening ingredients to add, but it leaves the freedom to the readers to use those they have on hand (white sugar, brown sugar, maple syrup, honey) rather than buying a new ingredient every time.
“Zero waste allows me to reduce my mental load,” she explains. Instead of always going back to the grocery store to buy the few missing ingredients for a recipe, we use the ingredients we already have. And in addition, we save money! “
An ecological impact
In addition to saving money, reducing food waste is an important gesture in the fight against climate change. Scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) present reducing food waste as one of the best solutions to achieve this.
So this seems like a great reason to share his best advice on how to be part of the solution. “And for it to be sustainable, it has to remain creative,” she concludes. When we force ourselves to eat certain foods to avoid wasting them at all costs, we move away from pleasure. “
Florence-Léa Siry believes that you must also be indulgent towards yourself and respect your own limits in these changes in consumption habits. This is what makes us even more eager to meet its zero waste challenges!