Could reducing food waste save the planet, as well as our souls?

Analysis: We lack nutrition, yet we throw away vast amounts of it too, due to our failure to value food properly

Do you remember when we found out that the prime minister, after one of the less damaging leaks from her administration, told her cabinet meeting that she scrapes the mould off jam rather than throw it away? She told colleagues that she scrapes the mould off and the rest is “perfectly edible”. She added that people should use “common sense” to work out if the whole jar should be thrown out. Giggles all round.

Like Norma Major’s advice to freeze leftover cheese and Margaret Thatcher’s habit of stockpiling tinned food to beat inflation, it was taken to be symbolic of a certain penny-pinching meanness, the ethos of a WI branch gone mad, apparently bizarre in people who are pretty wealthy by any standard.

Wrong though. The statistics on food waste – which is to say perfectly edible, good food, simply dumped – are depressing. We do not, as a society, value food, even when there are about 2 million people in the UK living in food poverty, many thousands of children turn up at school without a breakfast inside them, and many, many people of all ages have poor diets rich only in fat, salt and sugar – hence the obesity epidemic and all the health complications that accompany it.