Calendar for Leftovers

I have been a wife and a mother for over 30 years. One of my biggest pet-peeves is to see perfectly good food (and lots of money) being thrown in the garbage because everyone is too "afraid" to eat whatever is in the plastic container found in the fridge. I have thrown out hundreds of dollars in the garbage of just tuna salad alone! We have tried labeling and see-through containers. We've tried writing dates with marker on the packages themselves. We have tried various things at various times throughout the years but nothing worked. My family was overly paranoid that the two day old tuna would kill them!

Finally, I had an a-ha moment and we came up with a system that works about 80-90% of the time. On the first of the month, we print out a calendar off the computer and put it on the side of the fridge with a marker that hangs by a string (just to make it as easy as possible for everyone). Everyday, we just jot down what we had for dinner or if we made tuna salad, opened a package of lunch meat, etc. This way everyone can look at the calendar and see how "old" the lunch meat or tuna is. We can also count back 3 or 4 days to see what should be eaten up before it goes bad.

This has worked like a charm! I rarely throw out more than a tablespoon of tuna anymore and it has really helped on the grocery bill. I am pretty impressed that at last, a tip that will work for even my family!