You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey, it's Mariel.

When Margaret Lee was a kid, she watched her mom doing something that was a little unusual.

She used to like to save takeout sauces from every restaurant.

So she would have ketchup from one restaurant, barbecue sauce from another restaurant, maybe some kind of soy sauce or duck sauce from a Chinese restaurant.

After she collected a bunch of them, she would mix them all together.

And then she would use it to make a sauce for barbecue chicken.

Almost always barbecue chicken.

And honestly, it was usually really good.

Years later, when Margaret and her sister wrote a cookbook called Perfectly Good Food,

they dedicated it to their mom and the way she would rescue takeout sauces.

Because this was a formative lesson for Margaret.

It showed her that you don't always need a recipe to make something delicious, and you can find creative ways to use up just about

any ingredient in your kitchen. You have these great intentions to cook and eat the things that you're

spending your money on, and especially as food costs go up that's so frustrating, and to use it

and make sure that you eat it feels

very satisfying. The latest estimate from a nonprofit called refed is that a quarter of all food

products in the U.S. get dumped. And the residential food sector accounts for a big part of that,

which means if you spend $200 a week on groceries and takeout, you might be throwing away the equivalent of $50 of food.

But also, once you get the hang of how to use more of your food, it makes the daily chore of feeding yourself easier.

Food waste in some ways is like this trendy new idea, but for many thousands of years, that was just cooking.

You just used up what you had.

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