Some types of food go bad easily especially during hot weather resulting in losses. A case in point is fish, milk and bread as well as the various perishable vegetables and fruits. I find milk preservation the easiest since it involves just covering it with a clean cloth after inoculating with yoghurt or soup milk fermentation organisms. This takes only a few days. A dash of vinegar stops the milk from going bad.
Boiling milk in a clean pot can increase its lifespan too. If you have a fridge and keep your milk in the fridge, the milk can last 2 extra days after boiling before spoiling. You can increase the life span further by adding baking soda and repeating the process first.
This is a good thread for a tropical country that we are in. Yeah, food spoils fast so we should know how to handle leftovers. It is always the fridge otherwise when cooked food is left in the kitchen overnight, expect it to turn sour in the morning with small bubbles as evidence that it is spoiled. And cooked food should be cooked properly and half cooked food also spoils so it is not good. With drinks particularly milk, leaving it out of the fridge will make it ferment. During summer, it is the fridge or bust.
Freezing t is the easiest available solution. It is obviously not always possible to buy fruits and vegetables on a daily basis. So when bought on the weekends, I clean and wrap them to put inside fridge to use for the rest of the week. Milk is difficult to preserve for more than a day even after repeated boiling so is for cooked vegetables. Even though we become successful in preserving some of the cooked items, the food value definitely deteriorates. Turmeric and salt are good preservatives for raw meat and fishes.
For a person who lives in a tropical country, we do preserve our food by drying them, most specially with meats that gets contaminated most of the time with salmonela, and E.Coli. Another way of doing this is by smoking them this not only improve the umami flavor of your food it also adds a very hearty and sweet flavor. Have you tried Adobo? This is a Filipino dish which is known throughout our Country. If you haven't eaten one, I recommend that you try this. Adobo meals can actually last for about 24-48 hours without refrigeration if kept sealed in a container, I mostly use Zip lock bags for this. I was at one time able to keep the adobo fresh for 8 days in a vacuum without refrigeration and adding preservatives. If you want to know how I did that, just leave me a message and I'll share you my recipe.
i don't know if it's because I live in the UK or not, but when it comes to preserving foods I'm actually quite lazy. One of the problems I think is that we don't really get seasons of extreme heat and so we very rarely have to worry about preserving foods in that way and so when we do, a lot of foods just go to waste as we end up just throwing them out instead. A few years ago I remember my grandparents pickling various foods in order to make them last longer but these days I'd be surprised if many households actually went to that trouble over here.
The only way we can preserve food here is by putting it in the fridge. Even after doing so, it will still spoil after a while. The best way to go about it is to just cook only what we need so we have little to no leftovers which we usually give to the pets.
Summers are real bummers here as far as spoiling the food is concerned. A morning cooked meal gets spoilt by evening if not kept in the fridge. If you aren't regular user of milk then freezing it works best.
These days I think that more and more people are tending to do just that, cooking the right amount that they need rather than having leftovers to store for another day like they used to. Growing up I remember my parents making a batch of soup or stew on a Sunday and then storing it for it to be used during the week but that doesn't seem to happen a much anymore if it all. The way we cook and prepare foods, store foods and even eat is changing from one generation to the next, and while I don't do the things that my parents did, I'm sure that my children will see what I do as old fashioned and do something different as well when they are my age.
One method used by so-called preppers involves buying new (i.e., unused) paint cans and then filling them with dry goods like grains or pasta. After loading the can, and leaving a small void at the top, a chunk of dry ice is added. The lid is loosely put in place and, once any vapors cease to be emitted, then hammered down to seal the can with an inert atmosphere contained inside.
