With worry over waning summer meal programs climbing, news outlets like Slate.com are turning their attention to food waste.

Two recent reports by the online magazine shed some light on the most recent food waste figures, as well as ways Americans think they can reduce what goes in the garbage disposal.

Some good news for Campus Kitchens: many of the collective suggestions Slate.com compiled from nearly 200 readers are things our hair-netted, aproned volunteers already do.

The Statistic

The most recent peer-reviewed report that writer Nina Shen Rastogi found revealed 40 percent of food goes to waste from the time it’s created to before it reaches a person’s stomach.

“That’s not a measure of how much food individual Americans throw out,” she wrote

Instead, the figure factors in all food lost during its journey from farm, through processing plants, to supermarkets, left on restaurant plates, and rotting in your fridge.

In a perfect world, where there’s a Campus Kitchen in every city, CK volunteers would intervene somewhere in this cycle. Unfortunately, according to the National Institute of Health’s tally through the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, 40 is the current calculation, and there’s no telling how much is slop from food service outlets, or avoidable waste from the American public.

The Solutions

Slate readers answered Rastogi’s call for solutions with some simple, but very useful advice. Some of these practices may sound very familiar to Campus Kitchens:

  • Create and then stick to a shopping list*
  • Stick to a single cuisine to maximize efficiency
  • Wash and prep fruit and vegetables right away
  • Keep track of what’s in your fridge and pantry, with expiration dates (a no-brainer for all trained Campus Kitchens)
  • Use the freezer – and use it wisely
  • Schedule in your leftovers

For more on how to effectively put this list into practice, in your Campus or home kitchen, go here.

*The White House just put out its pilot episode of the Let’s Cook series, which teaches families how to make a week’s worth of affordable, nutritious meals. Check it out:

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