Saving Your Home From Food Waste, One Graying Avocado at a Time

A few days after a sizable grocery haul, you might find yourself staring into the fridge and losing your bearings. Following a recipe’s orders often involves a game of tetris with the contents of the shelves and crisper drawers: By the end of the week, you’ll have rotated so many items that the inventory is hazy. There are bunches of vegetables you only vaguely remember purchasing, or ones that seem to hide until they’re sorry sights, like puckering, graying avocadoes marooned behind cartons of milk.

To reverse course on trashing food—a habit that sends tens of millions of tons of otherwise-edible stuff into the waste stream each year—the Natural Resources Defense Council, in partnership with the Ad Council, recently launched a skill for Amazon’s Alexa (the omnipotent voice that lives in the smart-home Echo device). This new installment of the NRDC’s Save the Food Campaign empowers to preemptively stave off scraps before they pile up.