We bin nearly £500m worth of food every WEEK

BRITONS throw away a staggering £494million worth of food every week.

Cooking is one of our favourite pastimes, but research released for Stop Food Waste Day reveals UK shoppers still throw away an average 40 per cent of things they put in their weekly shopping basket.

Of those surveyed, some 45 per cent thought that wasting food was ‘insane’ given that the United Nation’s World Food Programme says around 821million people globally go hungry every day. Two in five were concerned about the environmental impact, while half of those concerned about their food waste regretted the unnecessary expense.

Timo Boldt, chief executive of recipe box company Gousto, said: ‘Our new research shows that food waste continues to be a massive problem.’ Its poll reveals that struggles with portion control lead to waste across the nation, both in the supermarket aisle (29 per cent) and on the plate (33 per cent). Roughly half of Britons admit they either make meals too small and don’t use up ingredients, or go too large and bin the excess. This was a bigger issue with women (57 per cent) than men (42 per cent).

Professor Margaret Bates, Professor of Sustainable Waste Management at the University of Northampton, said: ‘Food is considered cheap and therefore not valued adequately considering the resources involved in the production.’ Another reason that Britons throw away so much food is that they struggle with organisation. One in five bin food due to not properly planning meals while just over a third do a weekly shop, then forget what they bought.

Another poll for Stop Food Waste Day by Elmley found that lettuce is the most binned food in the UK, followed by bread, cucumber, milk and bananas. The leastbinned food was halibut, perhaps unsurprisingly given it often costs nearly £100 per fish – but can feed ten people.