Travelling to an appointment today sans children I managed to hear an entire Radio 4 programme without interruption (a rare pleasure). It was The Food Programme and was all about the food we waste. It was fascinating and made me realise that the way we live, shop and eat has got to be crazy. Here are a few of the facts which are pretty obscene:

1.UK households waste 25% of all the food they buy.                                                 2.There are nearly one billion malnourished people in the world but the approximate 40 million tonnes of food wasted by US households, retailers and food services each year would be enough to satisfy the hunger of every one of them.     3.An estimated 20 to 40% of UK fruit and vegetables are rejected before they even reach the shops-mostly because they do not match the supermarkets’ excessively strict cosmetic standards.                                                                                             4.Between 2 and 500 times more carbon dioxide can be saved by feeding food waste to pigs rather than sending it for anaerobic digestion (which UK government recommend). But under European laws,feeding food waste to pigs is banned.           5.   24 to 35% of school lunches end up in the bin.

Pretty depressing isn’t it. I am horrified in our household by the amount of food we (especially the children) waste. Little ends up in the bin because we have two dogs and my Dad has chickens for which we save old bread or uneaten sandwiches. I explain to the children how lucky they are to have all this food and that there are children starving in other countries (I guess all children hear this lecture at some point). They just stare at me as if I am stupid and point out that it won’t make the starving children feel any better if they eat up all that is on their plates. There is a logic to this argument of course but I am trying to make them understand that it is shocking that we have food to waste whilst others starve.

Supermarkets of course have a lot to answer for.The sell by date meant that lots of food was thrown away simply to make room for new stock. In a bid to reduce waste, the sell-by date was scrapped last year to be replaced by “use by” or “best before” dates. But you still have to ask youself if a bag of porridge oats really needs a “use by” date. Despite the recent legislation,supermarkets still throw away tonnes of perfectly good food each year.As well as this they encourage consumers to buy more than they need with their “buy one,get one (or even sometimes two) free.” I have never understood why they don’t simply offer the product at half price. The way they do it simply promotes greed and waste.It is also the supplier not the supermarket that bears the burden of the profit margins on these promotions.There are higher sales but no long-term net gain for the supplier.

Many groups,frustrated by the amount of food waste try to make use of it. Freegans salvage perfectly edible food from supermarket skips. Rubies in the Rubble make and sell chutneys made from discarded fruit and vegetables rescued from Spitalfields market. Perhaps the increasing food prices will make us all think harder about doing our bit to avoid wasting food in our own households. By not buying to excess and with careful planning and a little forethought we could all attempt zero food waste.