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Recycle for Wiltshire at Salisbury Library: Catherine Dixon, Phil Chamberlain and Sally Hendry. DB3503P1

FOUR bread rolls, two half loaves of bread, a litre of milk, chunks of cambozola and Stilton cheese, half a Victoria sponge, three pots of yoghurt, two half packs of mixed lettuce leaves, half a pineapple, a quarter of cucumber, four clementines, four pears, an apple, two bananas and a kiwi.

It might look like a shopping list but, to my shame, I have to admit this is not what I purchased last week, but what I threw away.

And knowing I was going to have to write this feature, I have to admit I cheated like hell in an attempt to avoid being seen as unnecessarily wasteful.

Faced with a load of unused vegetables which age had withered - a wrinkled turnip, two limp parsnips, half a sweet potato, some celery and a red pepper - I added an onion and some stock and turned them into soup.

Normally, I'd have chucked them without a second thought.

Instead, I portioned the soup up and put it in the freezer alongside all the other food items I have purchased surplus to requirements and "stored" away.

Needless to say, my freezer is stocked to capacity.

Not that I'm a sole offender.

Over a period of a few days, a colleague kept tabs on what was going to waste in her home.

Her list included enough leftover chicken curry to feed two people, a leftover portion of cheese pie and "seven half glasses of juice not finished by the kids."

Like me, her list included salad leaves which had turned to mush in the bottom of the fridge.

A report produced by Prudential on the nation's waste in 2004 was dubbed the Soggy Lettuce Report after it named and shamed the lettuce as the number one waste culprit, with 61 per cent of households admitting to throwing out rancid remains each week.

But the humble lettuce cannot shoulder all the blame.

According to WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme), a third of the food we buy in the UK ends up being thrown away.

In Wiltshire, that adds up to 40,000 tonnes of food waste each year, much of which ends up in landfill where it generates the greenhouse gas, methane.

There are lots of reasons why we end up with food that does not get eaten - we cook too much, we forget to freeze or chill it for consumption at a later date, we don't know what to do with leftovers and we bought far too much in the first place, tempted by the supermarket offers to buy in far greater quantities than we can feasibly consume before the sell-by date.

The organisation Recycle for Wiltshire has been supporting WRAP's Love Food Hate Waste campaign, which aims to reduce food waste with recipe cards, tips on how to shop smart and better ways of storing food to prevent it from going off.

Toby Sturgis, Wiltshire County Council's cabinet member for planning and waste, said: "There are a lot of reasons why so much food is thrown away.

"This campaign is packed with common-sense ideas about making the best of your food as well as helping the environment."

Common sense is at the root of many of the tips and suggestions.

Shopping with a list might seem basic, but how many of us bother to work out specific requirements for the next week's meals?

Let's face it, most of us start with a basic list and end up at the checkout with a lot more than we went in for because we've deviated from our actual requirements while shopping under the influence of impulse - costly, wasteful impulse which is a mere hop and a skip away from landfill.

"There has got to be a better way - and this campaign aims to give some simple suggestions on how we can tackle this," says Wiltshire waste services manager, Andy Conn.

You can find out more about the campaign, plus tips for reducing food waste and recipes for leftovers at wwww.recycleforwiltshire.com

10:15am Thursday 13th March 2008

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