Transcriber: Janelle Chan Reviewer: Emma G
Imagine going to the grocery store and filling up your cart
with the foods that you want your family to eat.
Making healthy choices that are actually within budget,
picking out the perfect fruits and vegetables.
Now imagine coming home and instead of putting those in your fridge,
in your pantry so your family can eat them,
you just put them right over to the garbage can and threw it away.
That seems crazy, right?
Just like throwing away your hard earned money.
This happens all of the time.
There’s just normally this little gap
between when you went grocery shopping and in garbage day.
Most families call that the curse for joy,
when produce goes to die.
Did you know that the average family
in the United States throws away 30 to 40% of the food that they buy?
Between produce that goes bad and leftovers that never get eaten.
30 to 40%
The World Economic Forum actually came out this spring to say
that globally the percentage is much higher
at 61% for household food waste.
We are literally just throwing our money away at a time
when our food costs are the highest that they have ever been.
How many of you guys have ever went to the store
to get something as simple as an avocado?
And you’ve walked out pushing a whole cart full of groceries out,
because you went into the store tired or hungry.
Right? You can ruin your whole entire grocery budget
for the month just by that one quick trip on your way home.
I knew the secret to saving money on groceries
was cutting out those kinds of quick trips.
But I still wanted my family to eat healthy.
Over the years, I developed a grocery solution to have food security
in my house while still being able to keep produce fresh longer.
Cutting out the need to go to the store so often.
I’ll tell you why this is important for me.
This is a picture of my family.
It's actually from a few years ago.
If you saw my husband tonight, you will see that he has a lot more gray hair.
But he has a lot of hair, so I'll give him that.
But what you can’t see in this picture or by looking at me
is I have an invisible illness called reflective sympathetic dystrophy.
Throughout my life, it’s attacked my hip and my spine.
It’s made it difficult for me to walk.
And I’ve even needed to be in a wheelchair in different seasons of my life.
Behind the smiling faces,
this is actually one of the hardest times in our lives as a family.
My hands in this picture are actually clogged and atrophied.
And for two years, I was unable to open them.
My friends and family, many who are here tonight,
they came every day to help get me dressed and feed me
and help take care of those little girls.
My husband was doing all that he could to manage everything that was going on.
As you can see, my hands are healed
and I can stand here on the stage right now in stiletto heels.
(Cheers and applause)
But this invisible illness still attacks me.
Things like changes in the weather and stress can really flare at my body.
Over the years, I’ve learned how to take advantage of the good days
to prepare for the days that are harder.
Because everybody has hard days, right?
I’ve learned that if I go grocery shopping
and take the time when I get home
and actually wash and put away my produce, it lasts so much longer.
Making it so I don’t have to go back to the grocery store so often.
In our family, we teach our littles who grow up to be bigs,
to eat a rainbow every day.
And by putting food in jars, no,
not only does it look pretty, it actually last longer, too.
When they go and look for a snack.
They can see exactly what they want from their fridge
and it makes them eat it more.
We actually have a monthly grocery shopping budget of $135 per person,
even being an allergy family.
I recently taught a group of young moms how to use that same exact $135
for their entire family and feed them, their littles, meals and snacks for weeks.
It is possible, no matter what your grocery budget is, even during inflation,
to have food security in your home.
It’s just a matter of learning some new skills
and being able to rethink the idea
that produce doesn’t have to be thrown away every few days.
When you rethink that, it doesn’t go into the garbage can
and you’re actually eating it,
your food budget stretches so much further.
During the pandemic, I actually had a really,
really hard time right at the beginning of that.
I experienced a huge loss in what I thought I was doing.
During that time, we were actually also going through our kitchen remodels,
so all of my hobbies were kind of taken away from me
and I ended up reading 136 books.
It was like, pass the point, being a good thing.
And I was becoming a pandemic introvert.
I knew I needed something positive and good to focus on,
and I’ve always had a calling on my heart to mentor other moms.
I started spending a lot of time
on different Facebook groups trying to help answer questions
and just uplift other moms during such a stressful time.
There was a common theme of the questions of I don’t want to go to the store,
it’s kind of scary. I wish I knew all about it.
And if they went to the store, the shelves might be empty.
And how did they have the items in their homes that they really needed?
These are things that I easily could answer the questions for.
I started sharing pictures of my fridge
on one of my favorite social media platforms.
And it was with the encouragement from the person,
my social media hero, actually saying
that I should start something and teach others about fresh produce
is the reason why I started The Cross Legacy.
And it happened that very first weekend to make a post about my strawberries
and how I get them to last longer.
Have you seen it? It’s actually been shared 18 million times in the last year.
(Cheers and applause)
It wasn’t until a few years ago
when I decided to ditch the plastics in our kitchen
and switch things to glass at the time.
Pickle jars at first.
But all of a sudden, I found the missing key to having long lasting produce.
I had always washed the produce items, but it wasn’t until I washed them,
dried them according to my instructions, and then put them in glass in the fridge.
All of a sudden I was able to have zero produce waste.
Zero.
I go grocery shopping once every three weeks and we have zero produce waste.
Not that it just didn't go into the garbage can,
but it went out to the campus for the chickens instead.
But zero produce waste, meaning the food I purchased for our family to eat,
we actually eat.
(Applause)
And for me, everything has changed
since I posted a video on Instagram
for showing strawberries in a jar that went viral.
So we're going to watch a little video of an example of what's on our Instagram.
For strawberries to last for weeks,
place strawberries in a large bowl with 10 cups of water
at 5% distilled white vinegar.
Set a timer for 2 minutes.
This is not enough time to go to [inaudible].
Put it in the colander and rinse and lay out on a towel to try.
They need to be bone dry.
Put it in the jar and put it in your fridge.
And you will have fresh strawberries for weeks.
Three weeks for fresh strawberries, not just a few days.
This was mind blowing for most.
I have this friend that lives in the neighborhood,
and she was always saying that she was going to the store to get more lettuce.
I was thinking, good job! Like you’re eating all these salads.
I didn’t realize she was needing to replace her lettuce every few days.
She started asking me questions and questions and questions
which she’s kind of famous for.
But it was this question asking me on how to keep my produce longer
that made me realize I truly did have a skill,
but not everybody knew how to do.
So for lettuce is the same as strawberries.
It’s 2 minutes, so make sure you set a timer.
We’re going to make sure it’s 5% distilled white vinegar,
not the 7% you use for cleaning your showers in your laundry.
5% will kill off the mold spores, E. coli, listeria and other harmful pathogens.
You're going to wash the lettuce and lay it out to dry.
And after two and a half weeks, it will still sound like this.
(Cheers and applause)
This is a three week old lettuce
that traveled with me here in a cooler.
But did you notice when I see after that little bit of moisture
that kind of hit my face.
Lettuce, even if it’s completely dry and you put it away,
it still has moisture in it.
So make sure when you put it in the container,
make sure that the stem is on the top.
I always tease that sometimes it looks like an umbrella.
Make sure it doesn’t look like a boat
inside the container with it looking like an umbrella.
The moisture will continue to drain off of the lettuce
and that way it won’t sink your boat.
These are just simple tips.
And there’s so many more for all of these items
to get them to last for weeks or months.
You truly can have the skills with just a little bit of knowledge
to save so much money on your groceries.
I am hoping that you guys walk away today knowing
that you can stop throwing away your grocery budget, too.