The old saying “waste not want not” may belong to a different era, but with the news that the average UK family throws out a staggering £610 of food a year, it’s one worth returning to.

We waste an incredible 6.7 million tonnes of food every year.

But the government’s Waste and Resources Action Programme says almost two-thirds of the food thrown away could have been eaten if we managed our lives better.

Only 19 per cent of our rubbish is made up of unavoidable waste such as vegetable peelings, meat carcasses and teabags.

The rest comes from leftovers we scrape off our plates after meals, and shockingly, completely untouched products that have been allowed to go off. Nearly one million tonnes of food is thrown away whole or unopened - almost half of all bags of salad bought ends up in the bin.

And the single food item wasted most is potato, followed by bread, apples, meat and fish.

Read the full article on the Mirror Newspaper website.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 10:16 am and is filed under advice, food, free recipes, fruit, money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.