Every week the finger of public blame points to something new. Last week it fixed upon the feckless wastrels of the kitchen, meaning nearly all of us.

According to a government-backed survey – although how anybody really knows, I cannot imagine – each household wastes more than £600 a year by throwing out food. This is not counting whatever it is that toddler hooligans leave on the sides of their plates. It is merely what goes straight from the fridge to the rubbish bin, or down the guzzler in the sink. Unconscionable waste! Be ashamed! Be very ashamed! That is the “message” our masters want to “send out”.

They have failed with me, at least. I don’t believe I waste anywhere near £600 worth of food a year in my kitchen, but even if I did I wouldn’t be at all ashamed. For one thing such waste is as nothing compared with the armfuls of unnecessary, nondegradable, landfill-guzzling waste that I throw out each week in the form of supermarket packaging.

The squandering of a few mouldy pears is hardly to be compared to the unavoidable waste of the plastic box, pear-shaped internal plastic mouldings and sealed plastic covering in which they arrived. And if one is bewailing the waste of the world’s resources, how about the thousands of lights in the huge supermarket where the pears were stored, which burn night and day, blazing from countless other shops and high-rise offices up and down the land? What about the mountains of food thrown out daily by restaurants, cafes and shops?

When blame and guilt are being apportioned, the usual procedure is to blame the wrong person. The poor struggling individual is the wrong person. There is nothing reprehensible, in a rich and peaceful country, about a little extravagance on the domestic front in the name of convenience or flexible catering or high standards in cooking.

I rarely know for certain how many people will be coming to supper each day, or whether we ourselves will definitely be at home. The number could be anything from two to eight or nine. Shopping every day might solve this problem, but I don’t have the time to do it and neither do most people: they are too busy earning the wherewithal. Flexible catering cannot be entirely frugal, nor can serious cooking.

However, the real truth is that I like waste. Bring it on, as Wendy Alexander said about the Scottish referendum. Thrift may be a virtue but it is one I grew to hate when I was a child and I reacted strongly against it by embracing waste. The women of my childhood - friends, relations and teachers - were still in the anxious grip of war-time parsimony. Even though the hardships of war were behind them - rationing was over and people were getting richer - they remained excessively economical, especially in the kitchen.

It was depressing. My childhood memory of sandwich-making is of a faceless woman grimly smearing a little butter onto a thin slice of bread and then equally grimly scraping most of it off again. Margarine was infinitely more virtuous but even that had to be applied sparingly. Sandwich fillings had to be as scant as possible, too, preferably of something nasty like paste, rather than something nice like fresh ham.

Biscuits were doled out sparingly. Stews were watery, with little meat; portions were small; and demanding more was frowned on. “Those that ask don’t get,” said Miss Erskine (not her real name), my mother’s dour Scottish friend who helped in the holidays. At school I was hungry at times.

The point of cooking seemed to be to use the least and cheapest possible amount of anything. The point of food appeared to be to have less than you wanted, unless you disliked it, in which case you had to have more and finish what was on your plate.

My mother was quite different. She believed in producing good food in large quantities, partly because she had lived in abundant California just after the war, but even she had not escaped the tyranny of thrift. She taught me that no part of the vegetable must be wasted; that meant saving and cooking the yellowing, wormy outer leaves of sprouts and cabbages and spinach, cutting off the rotten parts of potatoes, using the whole of a leek or spring onion, including the bitter green parts, and eating the good half of a maggoty peach. Squeamish meant spoilt; there were many children in the world who were poor and would be grateful for anything, even my reheated sprouts.

What I hated most was having to swallow lettuce leaves that only recently had sheltered slugs and snails that I had seen with my own eyes. “Extra meat rations,” Miss Erskine would say briskly when I found one. “Put it on the side of your plate” – where it would slither about. Milk that was going sour was pronounced perfectly all right. Worst of all, the fridge was filled with nasty-smelling little pots of unidentifiable leftovers, covered with saucers; nothing could be thrown away and these unappetising bits and pieces were added to whatever was cooking that day.

The struggle against waste seemed to me revolting, especially when it came to washing up Miss Erskine’s way. To avoid wasting hot water, she would wash up an entire meal in only one plastic bowlful. Before long the few suds had disappeared in a tepid brown Windsor soup in which she wrestled barehanded with all the glasses, plates and pots – plastic gloves were an unnecessary extravagance; cloths were unhygienic. Rinsing was wasteful; they were left to fester on the draining board.

That was thrift for the war generation and long afterwards. If it conjures up a golden era of good housekeeping, waste-free motherhood and apple pie, then include me out. It is hardly surprising that I was tempted into extravagance, not to mention plastic gloves. It was a joy, when I was first married and in charge of my own fridge, to throw food away recklessly. When I tore the heart out of a lettuce and dumped the rest in the bin, I felt I had come of age.

Frugality is a harsh discipline; there cannot be many people who are even capable of it these days. For one thing, most people can’t or won’t cook. I am grateful that for now, at least, we can in this country afford to be wasteful. Let’s hope they think of someone else to blame this week.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

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