We're wasting away

Tip all the bins into one sack; attack the fridge with another.

I do plan my meals, but all sorts of things can crop up to ambush a perfectly choreographed sequence of sell-by dates.

A barbecue one night, a meal out another and suddenly there is a bag of soggy salad a third of the size it used to be.

Next shelf down there's the various veg I buy with good intentions but that always loses the nightly toss-up with pasta - a pack of now-brown mince and fish that looks fine, but you just can't bring yourself to take the risk.

We spend £133 billion a year in this country on food.

And we throw away a third of what we buy.

In fact, 61 per cent of us chuck out at least one bag of salad a week.

"One of the key contributory factors is the increasing use of multi-buy promotions by the supermarkets, the buy-one-get-one-free offers," said Jeff Bray, lecturer in consumer behaviour at Bournemouth University.

"They are constantly encouraging the consumer to buy more than they need and that is leading to an awful lot of food getting thrown away."

And there is a confidence issue, he added.

We are using ingredients less and that detachment, that lack of knowledge, leads us to rely on the advice we are given, the sell-by dates.

"Some research has been done whereby it was found sell-by dates were far shorter than they need to be. That is to encourage the disposability of some foodstuffs."

We love our celebrity chefs, gauge ourselves by cookery programmes and have a pile of recipe books.

I do and I only know how to cook one dish.

All that and a cupboard full of gadgets and yet just eight per cent of meals are cooked from scratch at home today.

Meanwhile we get through two billion takeaways a year and eat 675 million meals at restaurants.

And we spend £1 billion on ready meals.

"One of the biggest changes has been demographically, where rather than having a housewife sitting at home all the time you have got both partners going out to work. That obviously limits the time people have got to do creative cooking from scratch and increases the level of disposable income so people can afford convenience foods," said Mr Bray.

"When you do less cooking, you become less able to do cooking and then it takes longer, it's a bit of a vicious circle. My mum can stand in the kitchen for half an hour and cook something fantastic. It would take me two hours to do the same because I am not as well practised.

"Sadly, most of us simply do not have the time to practise the alternative that we would like to."

Yet despite what is ending up in our fridge-freezers, endless food scares have made us more interested than ever about what is in our food and where it comes from.

There has been research warning that a charred lamb chop straight off the barbecue carried a higher risk of causing cancer than smoking a cigarette.

The Sudan 1 scare earlier this year had families everywhere rummaging through their cupboards for anything containing the colouring.

Chocolate is bad for us isn't it? But then we were told it could be good for our bones.

There have been frights over fish, chicken, eggs, beef, soup and just about every diet ever launched.

Once a comfort, now a confusion, food has turned from pleasure to problem in one generation.

"We can see in our shopping habits some attempts to eat more healthily," added Mr Bray.

"We are seeing supermarkets that have perceived better ethical values performing well. Waitrose is one of the top performing chains at the moment. Its market share is growing steadily and that is because we trust the food that is being sold by Waitrose probably more than we trust food being sold in some other stores.

"We have become increasingly concerned about the ethics, about how the supplier and workers have been treated, whether a fair price has been paid by the supermarket for a product. That is increasingly shaping our purchasing behaviour."

In the meantime, as it's Tuesday, I'd better eat my vegetables.