Another week, another party Boris Johnson was unaware he was attending. But let’s turn instead to other news and in particular the topic of food waste.

Last week a new survey revealed the staggering amount of food that we throw away in the UK. In total, 9.5 million tonnes of food is wasted each year, out of which households are responsible for around 70 per cent. The whole world, I should add, is at fault here: the carbon footprint for global food waste accounts for 10 per cent of all greenhouse gases.

To give you a sense of what this waste looks like, the UK annually throws away 941 million potatoes, 733 million tomatoes and 728 million carrots. One in five consumers say they bin all this veg because they don’t know what to cook. To help with this, supermarket Sainsbury’s are suggesting a simple solution: soup. ‘An easy way to help our health and planet,’ their current promotion argues, offering recipes and encouraging their customers to ‘embrace the deliciously diverse world of soup.’

All of which is very laudable – and ladle-able. And yet, having grown up in the north of England, my immediate response is this: yes, but is soup actually a meal? This is an issue I’ve simmered over for many years and found myself discussing again last weekend. My personal pottage policy is that while I’ll accept soup as lunch, it is simply too, well, liquidy, to constitute a proper evening meal. Serve me soup for dinner and my instinctive response would be, thanks for the starter, but what are we having for the main course? There’s a reason we talk about soup of the day, rather than of the night.

I’m not completely alone in this belief. In one classic episode of Seinfeld, Jerry is offered a new suit in return for taking someone out for dinner. But when they have dinner, the suit giver only has soup, which he argues doesn’t constitute a meal, and therefore still requires another dinner for Jerry to pay off his debt.

Etymologically, I appreciate I’m on the wrong side of the debate. After all, we eat soup rather than drink it. The word supper derives from the French souper and the German for soup, suppe, denoting a lighter meal. At which point I resort to my childhood northern-ness and the fact I still call my evening meal tea.

Perhaps it’s all to do with how thick the soup is (or possibly this columnist). Perhaps you’d bulk out the argument – and the soup – by adding beans, pasta or noodles. But in which case, follow the argument through and just swap the soup for stew instead. For leftover veg, anything else feels a wasted opportunity.