An audit of our food habits shows we are throwing it away by the bucketful.
Last year I became part of a group (now christened Love Food Hate Waste New Zealand) keen to reduce the amount of food wasted in New Zealand.
Most of the councils around the country are involved, and community recycling centres like the one at which I work.
It's an exciting project to be involved in, not least because there are so many people from different organisations collaborating across the country.
The first step was to find out how big the problem really is.
After a year of research, the results were released this week and they are shocking.
The average household throws away $563 worth of food each year, adding up to a massive $880 million nationwide a year.
That is a scary amount of money - and a scary amount of food.
As a nation, we throw away enough food to feed everyone in Dunedin for two years!
The figures were calculated by looking in more than 1400 household rubbish bins.
As people always underestimate what they throw out, examining what actually goes into the rubbish is the most accurate way to see how much is being thrown out.
The audit itself was painstaking (not to mention smelly) work.
The food waste was separated from the rubbish, recorded and categorised into avoidable (could have been eaten e.g. bread or whole banana ), potentially avoidable (some people might eat it e.g., potato or apple peelings) and non-avoidable (e.g., tea-bags).
They found that each year the average family throws out 79kg of ''avoidable'' food waste.
The actual food waste figures are probably even higher, because the bin audit only looked at the food thrown into rubbish bins.
It didn't count food waste that went into the compost or was fed to animals.
I know at my house, no food goes in my rubbish bag, but quite a bit goes into the Bokashi buckets.
Some friends have said, ''well, it's not really food waste if you compost it''. But let's face it, who wants to make really expensive compost?
Best to eat the food and compost the trimmings and scraps: the banana skins, coffee grounds, tea-bags and vegetable peelings.
The research also found that most of us underestimate how much food we throw out.
I know I do, because I feel a pang of guilt every time I throw out food.
According to the Love Food Hate Waste New Zealand research, I'm not alone.
Of those surveyed, 88% said they valued food and didn't want to throw it away, and 89% said wasting food felt wrong.
The million-dollar question is, how do we end up throwing out 123,000 tonnes of food a year?
The research gives us some clues by looking at the difference between high food wasters and low food wasters.
Low food wasters tend to be older and live in smaller households.
They are more organised, checking what food is in the cupboard before doing a food shop, using a shopping list, and only buying foods that will be eaten (probably easier to do if you have no children at home!)
Low food wasters are more likely to make meals from ingredients that need using up.
They don't cook extra food in case it's needed and they store leftovers in the fridge and eat them.
One sentence that made me giggle in the report was ''Higher food wasters are significantly more likely than lower food wasters to throw out stale, perished, older, or mouldy foods such as stale bread, or old or bruised fruit and vegetables, that are otherwise still edible''.
I laughed because that sentence brought to mind my mother's fridge.
Both my mother and mother-in-law are serious low food wasters.
My mother has a cavalier attitude to any date on food (with the exception of meat), and the only time she notices them is when my sister is due from London.
My sister always cleans out the fridge while she is on holiday and has been known to ditch mysterious substances to which my mother was very attached.
My mother has now learned to throw out the oldest-dated food herself and hides the others at the back before Lou gets here.
Growing up in my family, you quickly learned not to take too much notice of a ''best before'' date.
One night my sister brought some teenage friends home after a big night out and they found some tins of anchovies in the pantry.
The taste of an anchovy was shock enough to them.
Just as well they didn't notice that the best before date was about five years earlier!
The Love Food Hate Waste campaign in the UK found a lot of confusion about dates on food, and lots of food being thrown out unnecessarily.
The New Zealand research found most people understand the difference between ''use by'' and ''best before''.
A ''use by'' date is marked on food for health or safety reasons (e.g. meat).
A ''best before'' date tells you when food is at its premium quality (and as my mother would tell you, can safely be ignored).
My parents are part of the generation that grew up after the war, when food choices were more limited and food must have seemed more precious.
It is no wonder that their generation has a lot to teach us about saving food.
These days we can buy whatever we want from anywhere in the world, any time we want.
It takes a bit of discipline to use up the food we have at home, instead of popping into the supermarket to buy something else for dinner just because we feel like it.
In big and/or busy households especially, it's hard to stay flexible and have the right quantity of food ready at the right time.
We're all going to drop the ball sometimes, and some food is going to end up being wasted.
But by adopting even a couple of the simple tips from Love Food Hate Waste New Zealand, we can minimise the food we throw out and save some dollars.
And looking at the bigger picture, we'll also be helping the environment by valuing the resources used to grow, transport and chill the food.
Food embodies an investment of oil, water and money - we can't afford to throw it away.
• Gina Dempster is communications officer at Wanaka Wastebusters.
Each week in this column, one of a panel of writers addresses issues of sustainability.
Top tips
• Look at what you have in the cupboards and make a shopping list
• Embrace your leftovers. Eat them for lunch or use them in another dish
• Keep food that needs to be eaten visible e.g. at the front of the fridge
• Swap or give away food you have too much of.
• Store most fruit and veges in fridge (not tomatoes, pineapples or bananas)
• Use the freezer to extend food life e.g. freeze half a loaf of bread when you buy it.
• Let people serve themselves at the table, even children
• Encourage children to eat their lunchbox leftovers for afternoon tea
