Families Bin 40% Of Their Weekly Shop

Everyone’s banging on about food waste at the moment, but if we’re honest then we’ll admit we’re just as bad as everyone else. In fact, 40 per cent of the food families get in their weekly shops will end up in the bin – yikes!

That’s what research by Gousto released for Stop Food Waste Day – which falls on April 24th – says anyway. And us Brits are chucking out £494 million worth of food every week, which is bad for the bank balance and for the environment.

Professor Margaret Bates, professor of Sustainable Waste Management at the University of Northampton, told the Daily Mail: “Food is considered cheap and therefore not valued adequately considering the resources involved in the production.”

Another of the reasons we’re throwing so much away is because we’re simply not organised enough. One in five of us admit to not planning meals properly and another third do a weekly shop and forget what we bought.

Our biggest sins are making meals far too big and chucking out what’s left, as well as failing to use up ingredients, meaning there’s half a bag of veg languishing in the fridge and open packets in the cupboards.

When it comes to what we’re throwing out the most of, a study from Elmley said it was lettuce, followed by bread, cucumber, milk and bananas.

Popping half of a loaf in the freezer as soon as you buy it means it’ll still be fresh a week later when you would have chucked it out and bought another one. And that milk and those brown bananas can be easily combined to make a milkshake the kids will go mad for.

If you’re wondering what the least-binned food is – because Elmley looked into that too – it was halibut. Sure, most of us don’t have this pricey fish just knocking about, ready to be used up alongside that old carrot and half a can of tinned tomatoes.

So, in honour of Stop Food Waste Day, see what you could be doing to keep food out of landfill and money in your pocket.