Does this scenario sound at all familiar? You go haring off to the supermarket because “there’s nothing to eat”. You pile your trolley satisfyingly high — after all, who goes to the supermarket to buy three carrots and a carton of soup? You notice a couple of new lines — something photogenic and organic looking that’s bound to be terribly good for your children, so you chuck that into the trolley too.

There’s a three-for-two offer on chicken breasts (do you need that much chicken? No, but what a bargain). You haven’t made a shopping list because you left in a hurry, so you roam about the aisles, buying anything that looks appetising or useful. You reach the checkout. The bill comes to about £200. You pay, you pack, you lug it all home.

Fast-forward to five days later. You’re clearing out the fridge. Out go the bargain chicken breasts because they’re past their sell-by date. Out goes the second packet of organic fabulousness because your children refused to eat the first. Out go some soggy-looking carrots — what possessed you to buy three packets? And so on.

The bin fills up. The fridge starts to look empty. Time to go to the supermarket again and repeat the entire process. Oddly you’re suddenly in quite a bad mood.

It strikes you, not for the first time, that this isn’t a very cost-effective way of eating — to say nothing of the guilt you feel when you drop the carrots into the bin. Half the world is starving. Someone round the corner is probably starving.

The carrots aren’t actually inedible — you could easily turn them into soup. But somehow you don’t. And you don’t turn the stale bread into breadcrumbs or stick it in a bag to feed to the ducks, even though the thought does occur to you in passing. You just chuck it away.

The point of this sad story isn’t to out myself as being especially ungreen or irresponsible — like most people I do try to be neither in my feeble way. No, the point is to illustrate the findings of the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) last week that one third of the food we buy in this country ends up in the bin.

That third includes things such as used tea bags and vegetable peelings, but 15% of it also includes perfectly edible food. So I am chucking away £30 every time I do — or take delivery of — a supermarket shop. That’s £120 a month, which is £1,440 a year — a lot of money. It’s also a lot of food: as a nation, we chuck away 6.7m tons per year, according to Wrap. Talk about a throwaway society.

What’s peculiar is that most of us wouldn’t dream of throwing away, say, an unwanted dress — we wouldn’t just put it in the bin along with the tea bags. We’d give it away or maybe sell it on eBay or take it to a charity shop. Food, for some reason, has become the most disposable thing and the guilt we feel when throwing out carrots that have seen better days is only fleeting.

When I was at school we had to finish everything on our plate because of the starving children in Africa. They’re still starving, but it’s not a line you hear very often any more. Nor do many families sit down together to eat — the more usual scenario is one where children of various ages graze at odd hours, often without sitting down, peering endlessly into the fridge and helping themselves to random assortments of things.

This is a really bad way to eat and it surely contributes to the amount of food we waste: we don’t shop with a week’s family menus in mind, but rather pick out stuff that is likely to appeal to a collection of individuals all eating at different times of day.

The fact that we have such an embarrassment of choice when it comes to food — I can’t be the only person to enter Sainsbury’s feeling normal and alert, and exit it in a weird sort of spaced-out daze — ought to be a great plus.

Unfortunately none of its outcomes are positive: you roam around the aisles feeling completely bewildered, you spend rather obscene amounts of money on food that you’re going to throw away, and because everything is available in vast quantities, you find it near impossible to value it.

Hence, presumably, the death of leftovers. There was a time not that long ago when Sunday’s roast lamb would be Monday’s shepherd’s pie and Tuesday’s Scotch broth, but for cash-rich, time-poor families, the remnants are not deemed worth the effort and end up in the bin.

There also used to exist a certain postwar housewifely pride to “stretching” an ingredient or a meal, but that has gone too. We’re so spoilt that eating the same things three days on the trot, no matter how cunningly disguised, is unappealing and likely to induce vague embarrassment rather than pride.

The Wrap report suggests we have no idea how much we waste, but it is also true that we have no idea how much we buy. We just pile our trolleys high, feel a sense of satisfaction at the idea of providing for our families and are rather surprised to discover, three or four days later, that the cupboard or rather the fridge seems to be bare again.

Some of the blame for all this can be laid at the feet of supermarkets, with their stupid excess of packaging. I know that’s a different issue, but it drives me mad. Why must my avocado, which has a protective skin, be wrapped in special avocado shaped unrecyclable plastic pod? Why? Look at the three-for-two offers, the gigantic portion sizes that force you to buy too much food if you are a single person, and their sell-by dates.

Consumers aren’t complete imbeciles and nor are they as suggestible and malleable as supermarkets would have them be. Most of us can shop reasonably locally, buying what we need for the day only.

I recently started doing this — out of laziness and avocado rage rather than social responsibility — and the results have been surprising. My local shops — and they’re not cheap — provide me with food for everyone for far less money than I would spend in a supermarket and there is no waste. Nothing goes off, since you’re eating it on the day you buy it. There is something incredibly satisfying about shopping this way.

Thrift is the most unglamorous of virtues, but since we’re intent on playing out various takes on the 1950s housewife, from the baking of fairy cakes to decking out our kitchens with retro accessories, it may be time to rediscover it. There’s nothing embarrassing about not throwing perfectly good food in the bin. We could rediscover shame, too, while we’re at it, because throwing away a third of what we buy is just that — shameful.

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

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