Rest assured I'm not being rude! Here in England that also means 'buy one, get one free' - a regular and very popular offer in supermarkets right across the country. They get a heck of a lot more business, customers enjoy endless freebies so surely everyone's a winner? - Oh no, these innocent looking 'BOG OF's actually contribute to phenomenal amounts of food waste each year.

Following on from two previous posts about the problem of food (here are parts 1 and 2), I have today stumbled upon a story, which reveals just how easy it is to reverse some of our most environmentally unfriendly habits.

Quite miraculously, Tesco, the biggest retailer in the country (just to give you an idea, ten pence in every pound spent here goes to Tesco) - has cottoned on to the colossal levels of food waste. That's right, the penny has finally dropped!

Here are a few statistics that help clarify the extent of the problem:

Average annual value of good food dumped per household = £420

Average annual value of good food dumped by each family = £610

Value of good food dumped each year = £10 billion 

Weight of good food dumped each year = 6.7 million tonnes

Value of dumped food that has never been opened/used = £6 billion

Value of dumped food that is still 'in date' = £1 billion

Not only recognising the problem, Tesco has gone one stop further in its efforts to cut these shameful figures. BOGOF is to be renamed 'Buy One, Get One Free - Later', thereby enabling shoppers to postpone the collection of their free second product to a later trip. It's simple yet effective. Perishable items won't just sit in the fridge waiting to be thrown out, which is was generally happens at present.

This is a great sign that supermarkets are starting to to do their bit. Having faced staunch criticism from Environment Secretary Hilary Benn over the fact that their offers 'fuel the huge food-waste mountain', they are looking at ways of helping consumers shop more responsibly. With a Cabinet study even suggesting that such offers should be outlawed completely, at long last all eyes are on supermarkets, with mounting pressure for them to change the error of their ways.

It goes without saying, though I feel the need to, that the figures detailed above not only represent huge environmental damage, but a massive failure on our part, as human beings. So many go without enough food and water when there's more than enough in the world to feed everyone twice over. Meanwhile, we are throwing millions of tonnes of perfectly good food into landfill. 

I wonder if we couldn't solve a lot more problems in the same way. Some common sense and a bit of faith in the consumer can go a long way. After all, every little helps.