While staying at a holiday home in Croatia, I read the comments left in the “house book” by previous guests and found a fascinating complaint. The kitchen was deficient, one person wrote, because the batterie de cuisine didn’t include wooden toaster tongs, a tea-bag squeezer or a cheese knife. Now, preferences in kitchen equipment are personal. Beyond the basics – good knives and cookware, a few utensils for lifting and stirring – there’s no hard-and-fast definition of essential. Some people adore their mezzaluna, while I can’t see the point at all.

A tea-bag squeezer is in a different league though. For one thing, squeezing a tea bag, according to Whittard’s tea buyer Giles Hilton, extracts bitter compounds that you don’t want in your cuppa. And even if you did, wouldn’t a teaspoon and thumb do the trick? Wooden toaster tongs: why not unplug the toaster and use a knife? Cheese knives? OK, sort of useful. But essential? Come off it.

Kitchen clutter is a green issue because manufacturing it uses water, energy and raw materials. A single cheese knife is no big deal. Millions of cheese knives, electric lemon-squeezers, etc, equals large-scale manufacturing. If the item is inessential, or rarely used, those resources have, in effect, died for nothing.

To check out my clutter footprint, I did a scan of my miscellaneous utensils drawer (MUD). It was a sobering experience. I stopped counting at 50. I regularly use just five. Clear message: think before you buy anything for the kitchen.

What to do if the MUD is already packed with unused stuff? Well, you can try selling it on eBay. But my preferred option is Freecycle, the online community for giving away unneeded goods. If you haven’t heard of it, check out www.uk.freecycle.org; it’s your chance to give MUD-clutter a good home. Who knows? Someone may be longing for a tea-bag squeezer.

greenkitchen@thetimes.co.uk

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