I save everything. I feel guilty if I don’t. But I always eat it the next day (why the antipathy toward eating the same thing two days in a row? I do that all the time) so there is rarely any moldy food in the fridge. I freeze stuff like bread so it lasts longer. And I’m not overweight.
Believe me, this and many other things have been considered carefully. I’ve realized that I could never live with anyone ever again. 
I am a saver at heart, but find that I usually end up being that person who puts a tablespoon full of something in the fridge and ignores it until it evolves intelligence. I also realize that leftovers (particularly MY leftovers) aren’t usually very tasty: if they were that tasty, they probably wouldn’t have been left over in the first place! Also they’re not that good once they’ve been refrigerated (or - worse - frozen), the texture gets nasty and very unpalatable to me. Ick.
I felt bad about tossing all this food until my husband turned into a worm farmer and a gardening fanatic, so now it all goes to the worms or into the compost heap, and I look forward to seeing my uneaten carrots complete the cycle and become brand new carrots!
Remember, it’s not waste, until you waste it.
Pardon me? Please translate; this sounds intriguing.
I live with just me so there are no leftovers to the Stouffer’s frozen dinner.
Someone at my workplace regularly wraps part slices of bread, or half a carrot up and puts it in the drawer in the bottom. Sometimes these scraps are triple wrapped, and make up a package like a softball.
I throw them out every time I see them, without even checking the contents. I stopped checking the contents after one of them was a moldy puff ball, which spewed powdered death all over when I opened it.
I have noticed that the most dedicated hoarders never eat this stuff. It’s not about thrift, it’s about compulsion.
Tris
True dat. I’m a dedicated hoarder and I have to fight the compulsion all the time. I can’t explain it. But it certainly helps the compulsion to throw it “out” to the compost, instead of the landfill.
Bubble and squeak is the traditional Brit way of using up your leftovers from the Sunday roast. It’s normally potatoes and cabbage, but any green veg can be used, and it’s sometimes served with the leftover beef too. It’s so called because of the noises it makes when you cook it. It’s very tasty.
I don’t get that, either. Mr. Neville doesn’t even like to eat similar things too close together in time.
I always thought the name came from the, um, aftereffects of eating cabbage… 
I once clipped a Hi and Lois comic strip for my Depression-era mom.
Hi: (looking at a foil-wrapped mystery package) Why do you save these leftovers? We never use them.
Lois: Throwing away food is a sin.
Hi: But you keep it 'til it’s moldy, and then throw it away anyway.
Lois: It’s not a sin to throw away moldy food.
How do you avoid buying more than you can cook? There are so many things that come packaged in sizes too large for a single person or even two people. Most things seem sized for a family of 4. That’s where I have problems. You can’t get less than a pound of carrots. Meat is usually sold in >1 pound packages. Potatoes come in at least 5 lb bags, or if you buy them individually, they’re HUGE and would feed 3 people. (Speaking of which, what is up with the size of potatoes lately?? With everyone cutting down on carbs, why are potatoes so frickin’ huge?) Spinach is in 12 or 16 oz bags. A head of lettuce is way more than one person can eat before it goes bad.
I try not to buy or cook too much, but inevitably I end up throwing out 1/3 of a package of spinach, a few carrots, 1 or 2 green onions, etc.
Mine, too. My depression-era mom used to make “garbage soup” (her actual name for it) out of all the unused bits and scraps from the last several days. Gawd, that was some nauseating crap! Sometimes even my dad, who was the World’s Cheapest Guy, and who approved of using up leftovers in this manner, couldn’t force himself to swallow it.
I think my love of fine cooking and uber-fresh quality ingredients was launched during this period.
I love leftover soup. I also love garbage soup. My favorite, however is “Contents of my fridge, counter, and pantry” I take the contents of my fridge, which is usually randome veggies, the contents of my counter, which is usually unrefrigerated veggies, and whatever glues it together out of the pantry, usually noodles or beans. Occasionally, there is meat involved. It all goes in the crock pot with water or broth (made from chicken carcass or beef bones, etc.) and cooks all day. Once you have a big ol’ crock of “COMFC&P” you serve to guests, eat for dinner, subdivide leftovers and consume for meals to come. Or, you can freeze as a large quantity and serve to future guests. I live alone and still waste very little food. I cook freezer friendly meals, or things I will eat for dinner and lunch the next day.
Some suggestions for dealing with excess food:
Meat can always be cut smaller. If you buy a large roast, cut it into more manageable sizes, cook part, freeze the rest. Whole chicken can be roasted, parts consumed, remainder frozen and boiled into broth later.
Vegetables can be stored if you know how to. Root veggies store in the frige drawer or the pantry, onion and pepper can be diced and frozen, other things can be cooked then friged or frozen. Or, buy prefrozen veggies and cook exactly how much you want.
Plan ahead so you cook lots of food when you will be around with nothing to eat.
I know for a fact a fear of wasting food contributes to people being overweight. I’m related to a whole bunch of people who can’t stand to throw food out. There are starving people abroad and close by, but me gorging myself doesn’t lessen their suffering or make me a better person. So why bother?
Mr Kiminy and I grew up in basically the same socio-economic class.
Both of our mothers tend to save any scraps of food that were never put on someone’s plate. When I was in college and grad school, I took it on myself to clean out my mother’s fridge whenever I visited home during breaks, and I would literally find containers with only two or three bites of food in them, or foil packages with considerably less than a single serving of food. When my mother re-married, I gave up this task to my step-father, but I am still surprised at the amount of “scrap food” in their fridge when we visit. My in-laws’ refrigerator is generally so full of “scrap food” that there is often not enough room for “real food,” and it’s hard to figure out what is edible and what is much to old to eat. My mother and stepfather even have a second fridge in the garage to make room for the junk they save.
We now have the World’s Pickiest Eater, in the form of our 11yo son. We also have a 14yo daughter, who is stick-thin but refuses to eat normal meal amounts. We do save serving-side portions of unserved foods, but I refuse to save the food on my kids’ plates, just because they didn’t eat it during the meal. This means that we do throw away some food every day, but I compensate by giving the kids relatively small servings, with the knowledge that they can always get more if they like it and want more than I put on their plate.
It took Mr. Kiminy a long time to understand that a “normal” portion for our son was significantly smaller than his own “normal” portion. His parents still don’t get it. Even worse, they don’t seem to understand that food can be contaminated by saliva. So they give him a full, 12-oz glass of milk for breakfast. He drinks about half of it (which is normal for him). They put the glass in the fridge for later. By lunchtime, it is completely curdled from the salivary acids, and there is no way to force him to drink it. (I think I’m starting to convince them that a 6-oz glass is plenty, especially since he can have more if he wants it.) The same thing happens with half-eaten bowls of mac-n-cheese, or PB&J sandwiches. They don’t curdle, but I can pretty much guarantee that our son will NOT eat a sandwich that was made for lunch the previous day. However, it is NOT hard to make half of a peanut butter sandwich.
I have finally convinced myself and Mr Kiminy that it is perfectly acceptable to throw out food that has been partially eaten, as well as food that no one will ever eat. The result is that our fridge is more likely to contain edible food than inedible food, and we are much more aware of portion sizes than we were before we had kids.
I should have clarified that I generally have a chicken stock around, and then add leftover veggies or potato or whatnot to the stock, like whynot did. An existing type of soup, with leftovers added to it. Better? 
The added vegetables make it heartier, too. It is better than it sounds, really, although too many different, competing flavours don’t always work.
And yep, using leftover Asian food will sometimes give it a different kind of flavour, a bit more sweetness than I like in a savoury food. It’s all (usually) good, though.
My husband also does not like to eat the same thing for dinner twice in a row. Doesn’t bother me in the least. My usual solution for leftovers is lunch the next day, as we have a fridge, microwave and toaster oven at work. And it’s nice to have something hot and home-made for lunch instead of the dreaded yoghurt and banana (such lovely, healthy lunch foods, so portable, easy-to-pack—and I HATE them).
That’s why I love pasta. My mother usually makes a huge pot of spaghetti sauce and freezes about half of it, and puts some in the fridge-lunch is set for the week and I never get tired of spaghetti. Pasta-you just put it in a plastic bag in the fridge.
Other good leftovers-pierogies. Microwave 'em and yum!
Really? Where do you shop that they don’t have a produce section with loose vegetables? I admit that it’s hard to buy half a head of lettuce, but it’s usually pretty easy to buy one carrot if that’s all you’ll eat. Similarly, any reasonable butcher will gladly wrap you up 1/3 a lb of meat if you just want one serving.
I have never seen an option to buy just one carrot.
But, thanks to this thread, I just tried some bubble and squeak, and it was YUM!
Oh, I am the leftover QUEEN. I try to make too much so I have another meal. I will eat a bit less than I could so that there is enough for leftovers. I’m not keen on breakfast food so I usually have the night before’s leftovers for breakfast. Mmmm leftovers.
However, I will only eat them if it’s been a day or two since original cooking. Any older and they’re thrown out.
You have to wash less pots and pans that way.
I do the leftover soup thing too, but I call mine “desperation soup”, a name left over from when I was quite poor and sometimes really didn’t have anything else in the house. I keep a gallon sized wide mouth container in the freezer and add to it until it’s full, then thaw it and simmer it all in a stock pot. Some rules to keep it from being unpalatable:
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No meat goes in the bucket. If it’s got meat in it, it’s not suitable for soup. Unless it’s turtle soup, which it’s not.
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Saucy vegetables are right out too. Teriyaki and 4 cheese and creamy whatever competing is a Bad Thing.
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Eat at least a portion of what you cook before putting the leftovers in the soup, to be sure it doesn’t taste gross.
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Never, ever add a jar of pasta sauce you didn’t like over pasta, or you’ve just ruined a gallon of soup.
And the Malcolm in the Middle Rule: 5. Don’t use leftover Desperation Soup as the basis for the next round of Desperation Soup, or years from now you’ll still be eating that same broccoli floret. Eww.