Throw out your food.

Following a bin lorry around I saw it had plastered on its side the statement that "One-third of food we buy is thrown out". Now just accepting the WRAP as given.. oh hell no I can't do that let's delve in

We throw away 6.7 million tonnes of food each year in the UK, when most of this food could have been eaten. (Its not just peelings and bones –its good food).

Contrast this with the BBC's take which gives the figure as 3.3 million,which means that the "not just peelings and bones" makes up 3.4m or to put it another way - the majority.

Researchers found that more than half the good food thrown out, worth £6 billion a year, is bought and simply left unused or untouched.

So although it's "more than half" we should recognise that if the figure approached any other form of target (two-thirds, three-quarters) then that's more likely to be used so we'll take it as exactly half the 3.3m tons or 1.65m tons; so let's guess that value at £3 billion, now...

The study revealed that £1 billion worth of wasted food is still “in date”

So £1bn of the £3bn is presumably 0.55m tons of food. Hey look at that we've dropped from 6.7m tons of food to 0.55m tons of unused food thrown out that could have been eaten. Heck if I assumed that the £6bn figure referred to the "half" of good food and not the whole amount then we're talking 0.275m tons of food.

Now how did they get that monetary figure anyway? Well they don't say, but let's guess that if I bought an 800g loaf of bread for 65p and ended up throwing away 50g of it then that's 4p worth. Except my loaf of bread might have cost £1.35 in which case I've thrown away over 8p worth; same amount of waste, different cost. What if it was part of a BOGOF? I get two 800g loaves for £1.35, but one goes stale and I have to chuck 200g worth away - I've just wasted over 33p worth of food. Well no the part of the loaf I've chucked was free so at the most I've wasted about 17p worth. How has all this been calculated...who knows.

Okay having lightly fisked that let's get back to the proper question - "Why are we throwing food out?" over to that BBC page again

"A third of people are throwing away food that's cooked and left on the plate."

Well yeah if you want to keep it you have to wrap it up, keep it stored, and guess how long it will last for and, worse yet, be expected to eat it before it goes off. Why bother when you can chuck it and if you fancy some again in a few days/weeks time just nip down to the store? You know it's in date, how long it will last and it isn't sitting in your fridge taking up space in the hope that you might be eating it at some time in the future.

Speaking of fridges another WRAP report sums up attitudes nicely with

by simply storing most fresh fruit and vegetables inside the fridge, these foods stay fresh for much longer

Sorry would this be the fridge that's already full of leftover food not to mention everything else that insists that "once opened keep refrigerated" which appears to be increasing. Yep of course we all have American style fridge-freezers the size of double wardrobes that blend well in our 20 foot square kitchens and presumably powered by their own roof-mounted wind turbine. Ah but it's all our own fault because...

part of the reason for the increase in waste was that people were buying more fresh produce, which had a shorter shelf life.

There you go you should stop buying all this fresh produce and buy stuff injected with five kinds of preservatives. Of course it got mentioned on TV the fact that some are slavishly following the dates and "use within" markers on the packets without bothering to check if the food is still okay.

But still we can do better indeed as Zoe from London says

"I'd urge anyone who has some outside space to try composting."

Kudos to Zoe for not making it 'I'd urge anyone to try composting' which introduces another question 'What is the waste distribution per capita across the country?'.

So the conclusion appears to be - we don't know how to either store or cook food properly and may have nowhere to recycle the true left-overs. The first requires education in food (which appears to be starting) and the second is food-pickups that are already being trialled in various areas. So what was the point of the media attention on this report again?