BOZEMAN — Holiday shopping is on the top of a lot of people's minds. But before you just go throwing everything in your cart at the grocery store, you might want to think about how much of it you’ll end up wasting.
Everyone has that traditional meal they enjoy every year around the holidays. I asked some shoppers their favorite meals.
“Probably a good elk steak,” says one woman. “Cinnamon rolls Christmas morning,” says another. "I have an old family recipe for rolls,” says Stevie. And for Adam? “I’m Italian, so Cioppino”.
For many people, there’s tons of food going around. Sometimes even too much. So how do we make sure we’re making enough Cioppino to go around, but not so much as to be wasteful?
Here's what Adam Paccione, the owner of Red Tractor pizza told me: “Try to only buy exactly what we need for each meal. And then we don’t buy more food until that meal has been used for lunch or dinner."
And for Anya, who I caught shopping with her baby, Auggie, “Composting is a big one. Sometimes you can’t avoid it. So, when you can’t avoid it? At least it’s not going into a landfill."
So how big of an issue really is food waste around the holidays?
“It’s quite shocking, actually. Waste goes up 25% around the holidays between Thanksgiving and Christmas,” says Rory Sandoval.
Sandoval is the general manager of the Bozeman Co-Op. He tells me around the holiday season, the Co-Op sees up to 17,000 customers a week.
“Six weeks a year that are off the charts with activity,” he says.
But according to Feeding America, 47 million people, including 14 million children, experience food insecurity annually. And with 1 million extra tons of food wasted around the holidays? Rory shared with me some steps the Co-Op has been taking to reduce food waste.
“We have been very thoughtful about the food that we’re buying. So that we don’t have too much. We want to have enough, but not too much,” says Rory.
And when the Co-Op does have extra food?
“We have a path to local food banks,” Rory says.
The co-op donated 14 tons of food last year alone.
“We have a path that goes through the staff. Because the people that work here are not going to go hungry. And after those things? We go to composting,” says Rory.
Which is a huge operation for the co-op, considering in 2023 alone, it diverted 96.5 tons of waste from landfills through composting in partnershp with Happy Trash Can.
“We’ll take whoever's compost that you want to drop off here,” Rory informed me.
Anyone interested in reducing their food waste can bring their holiday scraps to the bins behind one of the Bozeman Co-Op's locations.
And for Stevie, who is excited to take a crack at her family's recipe for rolls? She just hopes people remember, “We’ve been told that the holidays are a time where we need to buy and get and show love through purchasing things. When in reality these holidays were started as a way to come together and enjoy the fruits of the harvest."
