A couple of weeks ago, rushing home from work, I dashed into the delightful Donnybrook Fair to grab one of their nice wraps. While there, I bought some lovely smoked salmon. It was just too delicious to leave behind. Yesterday I took the unopened salmon from the fridge and threw it in the bin.

Irish households spend an average of €700 a year on food we don’t eat. We throw out a million tonnes of wasted food annually. Globally, 1.3bn tonnes of food is wasted each year, yet one in seven people in the world suffers from food poverty.

I don’t need to spell out how disgusting the whole scenario is. We are all guilty of food waste while suitably embarrassed by its consequences.

So, I was very interested in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s War on Waste series which began on the BBC last week. British consumers, like us, are massive food wasters on two fronts.

However, whatever about throwing out perfectly good food just gone by its sell-by date, what made me most angry was the amount of food that is farmed but doesn’t even make it past the farm gate – farmers are producing food that is rejected because it’s not cosmetically consistent with consumer demands. In other words, the vegetables are a little wonky.

Fearnley-Whittingstall highlighted one third-generation family farm that was eventually squeezed out of business. Part of the reason for their demise was that their parsnips needed to meet strict criteria in terms of shape and size, which meant that they were throwing out 20 tonnes of perfectly edible parsnips a week.

So, are we to blame? Multiples in Ireland and the UK claim they listen to customers’ wishes. That would suggest that we, the customers, don’t want out-of-shape parsnips or carrots or apples that are not the perfect colour.

Last week, leaving a meeting in central Brussels, I walked across the Grand Place and saw a poor young woman with a small baby, begging. I knelt down and spoke to her. The fear in her eyes was noticeable. The baby was four months old and they were from Syria. I went into a nearby café and bought her some hot food.

She left me in tears as she was so thankful. And to think of the food we waste at home. That said, there are organisations like Food Cloud doing great work in redistributing unwanted but in-date food. And Tesco, to be fair, is partnering with them on this.

Anyway, as I dumped the salmon, I reminded myself never to shop for food when I’m hungry. That is one sure way of reducing waste.

Women & Ag Conference

Following the hugely successful Women & Agriculture Conference, I attended a virtual women-free farming event in Dublin last Tuesday week. The ICOS conference had an excellent lineup of speakers, including Phil Hogan, Tom Arnold, Simon Coveney, Harold Kingston, John Fitzgerald and Sean Brady.

Only one of the panellists all day was a women – Maire Ahern-McCarthy from Inishannon, who was there to talk about the lack of women on co-op boards. I counted no more than 10 other women out of the 150 in attendance. That is no reflection on ICOS but a reflection on the lack of women involved at decision-making level on mart, dairy co-op and farming boards. It’s not as if there aren’t enough able women as, the Women & Agriculture event continues to prove.