A recent report by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation revealed that worldwide approximately 33% of all food is wasted at a cost of £500 billion.

Those are staggering figures when taking into account the fact that nearly one billion humans are classified as starving. Put another way that’s approximately three time the population of the USA or eighteen times that of the UK.

Food wastage occurs in many forms from supermarkets rejecting malformed (but perfectly edible) fruit and vegetables to spoilt Westerners overfilling their plates and gorging themselves at all-you-can-eat buffets before discarding half the contents of their plates into the rubbish bin.

Those who govern us don’t appear to have any bright ideas on how to solve the problem but in the case of supermarket waste the rules regarding size and shape of vegetables need to be urgently reviewed.

As for the rest of us a little more restraint might be a good idea.