When it comes to taking a large bite out of our toxic throwaway culture then mum’s the word

My

mum is not one to throw things out. Actually that’s a bit of an understatement.

Sometimes that comes in handy, like the Christmas morning when I said I fancied a glass of Buck’s Fizz and she said, “Hang on, I think I have a bottle”. With that, she reached into a cupboard and produced one – which was 14 years old. Sell-by October 16, 2004. I kid you not.

She doesn’t like to see things go to waste, but she often forgets she has them.

So I was amused to read that Theresa May thinks

nothing of My mum

scraping the kept a mould off the

top of her jam bottle of

in a jar and fizz that

eating what’s was 14 underneath.

She says we years out

should apply of date common

sense as to whether food is safe to eat, and I’m sure my mum would agree with that.

Last week, food waste campaigners pointed to new research showing supermarket milk can be safe to drink for up to seven days after the official use-by date, with millions of pints being thrown away unnecessarily.

I’m not quite as cavalier as my mother, and while I would apply the sniff test, I wouldn’t drink or eat something that was more than a day or so out of date.

There’s much more information around nowadays so we’re aware of the dangers of bacteria growing on food. In that sense, it’s good to be cautious.

I also have a bit more money than I did 20 or 30 years ago, so in a sense I can afford to be a little less prudent – and that’s probably true for a lot of people.

But if research suggests that some food products can remain safe to consume days after their use-by date, then we need to pay attention to that. The expiry date system feels symptomatic of manufacturers covering themselves because of the blame culture in which we now exist, with people seizing on opportunities to sue, or have a go on social media.

And when you see shocking figures about the estimated 250,000 tonnes of edible food wasted each year, costing individual households hundreds of pounds annually, and you think about those people visiting food banks and using shelters who could really use it, then there has to be a better way.

There are some brilliant schemes around through which retailers can redistribute food that would otherwise be wasted, and it’s surely incumbent on all manufacturers, growers and stores to join in.

As individuals with more money and less time, we are probably guilty of becoming less prudent, not properly planning meals and generally buying more than we need.

So while I might not store things in my cupboards for 14 years, I’ll be a little more mindful of what I put in the bin from now on.

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