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Lettuce is one of my favourite things to stock up on when the weather starts to warm up, as I love being able to throw together wraps, fresh salads or other easy meals in under five minutes. I do not want to spend a lot of time cooking on a sunny day, but lately I have been reluctant to buy a head of lettuce or any salad leaves at all, as I noticed they were wilting after just one day.

There is nothing worse than finding soggy lettuce sitting in the fridge, as I recently realised that not only was I wasting money but the wilted leaves were leaking water as they spoiled. This excess amount of moisture got all over my crisper drawer, which meant I had to deep clean my fridge and throw away a lot of other vegetables, as it was causing them to rot too. It was really annoying having to replace so much food, so I decided to do a little research and discovered that keeping lettuce in its original supermarket packaging is actually one of the worst ways to store it.

It turns out lettuce naturally contains a lot of water, which tends to leak everywhere once its been harvested, and keeping it in plastic will trap all that moisture in an enclosed space.

This will cause lettuce to quickly become slimy, brown, and even mouldy as it rots, and it will also cause any other food stored near it to start spoiling too.

Most people just throw lettuce in the fridge after coming home from the shops, but actually taking two minutes to unwrap it and remove the plastic packaging will help keep it fresh.

I decided to try storing it the right way after doing a food shop last week, and I am happy to report that my lettuce is still crispy and fresh almost two weeks later.

All I did was throw away the plastic the lettuce came in and instead wrapped it up in tin foil, which has greatly helped extend its shelf life.

Tin foil is not airtight like plastic, which causes moisture to build up, and since it is a more breathable material, the water will evaporate instead.

It helps keep the lettuce cool and with just enough humidity to keep it crisp, and not soaking wet like plastic does.

Using tin foil also helps protect the other food in my fridge so I do not have to worry about waking up to a big slimy mess again.

Properly storing lettuce is easy, as I just tore off a big piece of tin foil, wrapped it loosely around the lettuce and then stored it at the bottom of my fridge.

It hardly took any effort, but it has been over 10 days and my lettuce is still fresh without any brown spots so it worth trying out if you want to cut down on your food waste.