With summer comes heaps of fresh fruit at your farmer’s market, and you might find you’ve brought home more than your family can eat. If you have fruit about to spoil, you don’t have to toss it in the trash. Put it in your freezer instead.

The New York Times recently featured five recipes for fruit ice, which make great use of ripe fruit.¹ Unfortunately, the recipes, including Mango Lime Sorbet, Watermelon Granita, and others, all call for sugar and corn syrup, which I don’t recommend.

You can, however, make a tasty treat using just frozen fruit – no added sugar necessary. Some people enjoy plain frozen fruit, for instance, as a sweet (and cooling) treat in the summer months. Frozen grapes are popular but you can also try frozen bananas and berries. The latter work wonderfully when added to homemade smoothies.

If you want a sorbet-like texture, all you need to do is blend up frozen fruit with a bit of lemon juice (optional) and you’ll have homemade sorbet in a flash. Take the incredibly simple watermelon sorbet recipe from Real Food Kosher, below, for example:²

    Watermelon Sorbet

    Ingredients :

        Half or whole watermelon, cut into chunks, rind and seeds removed
        Freshly squeezed lemon juice – optional

    Method:

        1.Freeze watermelon chunks overnight.
        2.Place frozen chunks in blender, add lemon juice if using, and blend. Depending on your blender, you may need to add a bit of water or juice to help crush the chunks.

Freezing Your Fruit Helps Cut Down of Food Waste

You might not think throwing a bunch of rotten bananas or mangoes in your trash is a big deal, but organic waste is actually the second highest component of landfills in the US. Organic landfill waste has increased by 50 percent per capita since 1974.³

Further, a report from the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) revealed that 40 percent of food in the US goes uneaten, which amounts to a waste of more than 20 pounds of food per person, every month.

This amounts to upwards of $2,275 in annual losses for the average US household of four.⁴ This isn’t simply a matter of the food itself, as with this waste comes:

      •  $165 billion that is essentially “thrown out”
      •  25 percent of freshwater usage, wasted
      •  Huge amounts of unnecessary chemicals, energy, and land use, also wasted
      •  Rotting food in landfills, which accounts for nearly 25 percent of US methane emissions

The NRDC report also estimates:⁵

        “…food saved by reducing losses by just 15 percent could feed more than 25 million Americans every year at a time when one in six Americans lack a secure supply of food to their tables.”

In all, it’s estimated US families throw out about 25 percent of the food and beverages they buy. In the UK, about two-thirds of household food waste is due to food spoiling before it is used. And shockingly, more fruits and vegetables are wasted in the US food system than are actually consumed (52% are wasted versus 48% consumed)!⁶