Hilary Benn, the Environment Minister, deserves credit for promising an end to sell-by and best-before dates. "Too many of us are putting food in the bin simply because we're not sure, we're confused by the label, or we're just playing safe" he said.

He's right - though I'm not so sure about the evidence used to justify widely-cited claims that the UK wastes a third of the food it buys. The figures come from WRAP, the Waste Resources and Action Programme, a Government-funded body that aims to reduce waste and improve recycling. It funded an attempt to measure food waste from homes by collecting the contents of rubbish bins and analysing them. Nice work for somebody.

 So far as one can tell from the published report, this was scrupulously carried out, though it includes some bizarre findings. It estimates, for example, that 11,000 tons of pheasants are binned annually by careless British consumers. If an average pheasant weighs just under a couple of pounds, that’s around 15 million birds – possible but unlikely, as only about 20 million are raised every year. Sampling error is the obvious cause for this odd finding.
 
The report goes on to estimate the total cost of these wasted pheasants at £128 million, but in my area they retail at about £3.00 to £3.50 each (or less), so a more accurate figure would be £50 million.
 
Be that as it may, the headline claim in the report – “A third of the food we buy in the UK ends up being thrown away” – is largely spin. This “waste” includes bones, apple cores and potato peelings which, as the report has the grace to acknowledge, most people do not regard as waste. Subtract these and the actual avoidable food waste comes down to 18.4 per cent by weight – not a third, but rather less than a fifth, which doesn’t sound anything like as impressive.
 
To achieve its figure of one third, the WRAP report performs various sleights of hand that may or may not be justified. For a start it measures waste by value, rather than by weight. That means that low-weight but pricey items such as salad vegetables boost the food “wasted” from 28.4 per cent (by weight) to just under 32.2 per cent (by value).
 
The report also increases the total by adding food that it claims is wasted but is not actually thrown into the dustbin. Where does this waste go? Some goes down the drain – where there is no way of measuring it – while the rest is composted or fed to pets. Composting or feeding pets is not waste as normally understood, so this adjustment is at least open to argument. If we disallow it, total food waste for the UK comes down from 6.7 million tonnes a year to 5.9 million tonnes.
 
Subtracting potato peelings, apples cores, and bones brings the total down to  just under 4 million tons, to be set against the total of 21.7 million tonnes of food purchased. That is an 18.4 per cent wastage rate.
 
Is that a lot? It’s really hard to say. Wasting any food at all is regrettable, but it is also inevitable. Bread goes stale, fruit goes off, and salad vegetables, especially leaves, can usually only be bought in pre-packaged quantities that are likely to prove too large, rather than too small. Salads, bakery items including bread, and fruit are the three food groups with the highest wastage rates, followed by vegetables. 
 
The fact that wastage rates are pretty consistent regardless of age, ethnicity, and household make-up tends to confirm that waste at some level is a common factor in food preparation and consumption. Families with young children, unsurprisingly, have the most overfilled bins but on a per capita basis do no worse than others. While the report lacks any historical perspective, it is certainly possible that before the days of fridges, freezers, and other methods of food preservation, wastage or spoilage rates were higher rather than lower than they are today.
 
There's every sense in trying to reduce waste and save money. But are today’s wastage rates really a scandal?  Verdict not proven, I'd say.