Giving Compass' Take:

• Toni Desrosiers, the founder of Abeego beeswax wraps, explains how food has a natural life cycle, and to curb food waste, we need to think about how to preserve that cycle. 

• Can incremental changes in food preservation help solve long-term food waste goals? 

• Read about other ways to reduce waste. 

Toni Desrosiers, founder of Abeego beeswax wraps, wants people to start thinking about the natural life cycle of food.

"Every piece of food is on a journey from living to not alive. Often we're throwing it out prematurely because we don't know how to use it in a later phase of its life." These words from Toni Desrosiers, original creator of the beeswax wrap and founder of a company called Abeego that now sells them, were part of a conversation we had recently about household food waste and how to reduce it.

Desrosiers explained that people are generally not taught to see food as being on a spectrum of freshness, nor are they informed about the different ways in which you can use foods at various stages of deterioration. It's not as black and white as we may think, but more about finding the ideal use for an ingredient based on its age.

As the trend toward reducing single-use plastics at home continues, Desrosiers worries it could lead to more food waste – because when we stop wrapping food, it deteriorates more quickly. According to experiments conducted by Abeego, keeping food 'naked' in the fridge causes it to lose 30 percent of its natural moisture within three days. When wrapped in Abeego beeswax wraps, it loses less than 1 percent in the same time period. Plastic wrap eventually results in slimy, wet, rotten food because it is not breathable and does not allow food to go through a natural life cycle.

Read the full article about new mindsets about food waste by Katherine Martinko at TreeHugger.