How much food waste do you produce in a week?

The average household in the UK throws away eight meals per week. Are you doing better or worse? You don't know for certain until you collect the data.

“Some people genuinely don't realise they waste food, but no one's perfect,” said Sam Hubble, behavioural change project manager at the Waste & Resources Action Programme. 

He recommends conducting a household food waste audit: basically, writing down all the food you buy but don’t eat. That way, you can pinpoint how much you’re wasting—and start cutting down. Here’s how to get started. 

Pick a week when you will be eating more or less normally—so not your holiday to Italy. You might start with your Sunday big shop and end the Saturday after, recording all food waste in-between. 

Resist the temptation to be on your best behaviour. “Don't consciously try to make any changes,” Hubble said. The goal is to figure out what food you waste in a typical week, not to lie to yourself. 

Make sure to invite any other members of your household on board—especially the little ones. “Children are fantastic at delivering that nagging effect to their parents,” Hubble said. They won’t let you toss food without writing it down.

The gold standard of food waste research is waste composition analysis: basically, sorting through and weighing out every morsel of food in the bin. You don’t have to go that far. 

Hubble recommends good old-fashioned pen and paper. Love Food Hate Waste offers a printable audit sheet for free online. “Leave this in your kitchen so you're able to not just focus on meals, but also snacks and drinks.” 

If you’re feeling extra scientific, you can leave a scale on the counter to record the weight of any food you waste. Only do this if you want to! It’s better to complete an approximate audit than to give up on a perfectly precise one. 

The next time you toss your leftover lunch, spoiled milk, or veg scraps, write down some stats. 

Write down any food you could have eaten but didn’t. You can ignore anything inedible, like eggshells, bones, and banana peels. 

Record how much food you threw away. This can be an exact measure (one litre of kefir, 320 grams of cheese) or a rough estimate (a handful of almonds, three slices of ham). 

Did you pour it down the drain? Toss it in your compost heap? Put it in a council food waste bin? In an ideal world, any food you don’t eat should get recycled. 

“Probably most importantly, and probably the hardest one to answer, is why [the food]’s not been eaten,” Hubble said. “Because that's really helpful for the next stage in terms of trying to tackle the root causes of why it's being wasted.” 

At the end of the week, you'll probably notice some trends. Maybe you never manage to finish the raspberries before they go mouldy. Maybe you really, really hate kale. Now that you know that, you can come up with strategies to avoid waste in the future.

The most common reason food gets thrown away in UK households? It simply didn’t get eaten in time.

Don’t let good food go off. Buy what you need—and nothing more.

Once you have brought food home, store it properly. Almost every form of produce lasts longer in the fridge, including pantry staples like potatoes. 

About a quarter of household food waste in the UK is down to personal preference. “People will often, because they've always done it, peel the skins on their potatoes,” Hubble said. “They're perfectly edible, but many people discard them without a second thought.”

To cut food waste, give peels a chance. 

Sometimes, we throw food away because there’s just too much of it. There’s a simple solution to this one: don’t bin leftovers. Eat them for lunch the next day or fold them into your next meal. 

Now that you know how much food you waste per week, you’re probably eager to cut down. “When people measure and are aware of what they're wasting, there is a natural prevention effect,” Hubble said.

The goal is to not waste food at all. “Eat everything you can, and anything you can't should be recycled,” Hubble said.

But don’t let perfection stand in the way of progress. If you used to throw out ten meals a week, and now you throw out two, that’s great news. 

You can always try another food waste audit. “Beat your score from the week before,” Hubble suggested.