Score the two plans against the four reasons food is actually thrown away at home, and leave the cook out of it. In UK households in 2022 the 4.4 million tonnes of edible food binned split into cooked, prepared or served too much at 1,094,000 tonnes (25%, £4.95 billion), smelled or looked off at 953,000 tonnes (22%, £3.71 billion), personal preference at 977,000 tonnes (22%, £3.25 billion) and past the date on the label at 758,000 tonnes (17%, £3.15 billion), in WRAP's UK food waste key facts. The condition that changes the comparison is the calendar: a plan that fails only on the evening one cook gets home late is a scheduling problem, not a worse plan.
Compare on the four reasons, not on effort
Pick a span both people can picture: three evening meals for the same people in the same week. Write the fixed constraints first — a late return, a shared oven, a budget that cannot move, a meal someone will not eat — because a constraint discovered halfway through rewrites the comparison.
Dietary needs and food-safety requirements are constraints, not positions to argue. A plan states that an ingredient or a preparation is unsuitable and moves on; nobody explains a health matter to take part.
Give each person a column and a job. One drafts a plan and answers for it; the other fills in the four rows from the cupboard and the calendar rather than from opinion. Then swap, so each person has answered for a plan.
The comparison table
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| Reason food gets binned (UK, 2022) | What to check in Plan A | What to check in Plan B |
|---|---|---|
| Served too much — 25%, £4.95bn | Portions written per meal? | Portions written per meal? |
| Looked or smelled off — 22%, £3.71bn | Days between purchase and use | Days between purchase and use |
| Personal preference — 22%, £3.25bn | Anyone eating a meal they did not choose? | Anyone eating a meal they did not choose? |
| Past the label date — 17%, £3.15bn | Any item bought for one evening only? | Any item bought for one evening only? |
The shares come from the same 2022 dataset as the opening figures (key facts). A plan that wins three rows and loses the fourth badly is not the better plan; the row it loses is where the food goes.
The label date is where two plans usually differ
A plan with six new ingredients has six deadlines; a plan with three has three. The distinction on the pack decides how much slack each deadline has: the European Commission treats "use by" as an indicator of safety and "best before" as an indicator of quality, and a 2018 Commission study estimates that up to 10% of the food waste generated annually in the EU is linked to date marking, with the same market study judging the date mark poorly legible on 11% of products sampled (date marking and food waste prevention). Follow the pack and local food-safety guidance rather than stretching a date to keep a plan intact.
Count the ingredients that appear in exactly one meal. They carry the whole risk of that evening changing.
An example: three evenings, two people
Take two real plans as the example; the arithmetic is shown. Plan A uses three separate recipes and six new ingredients; Plan B uses two recipes and one familiar meal, with three new ingredients. Two of Plan A's ingredients come in 400 gram packs of which 200 grams are used, leaving 2 × 200 g = 400 grams unused.
At the UK 2022 value of edible household food waste — 65 kilograms per person a year worth £260, so £260 ÷ 65 kg = £4.00 a kilogram — that 0.4 kilograms is 0.4 × £4.00 = £1.60 across three evenings, or £1.60 × 52 = £83 a year if the same week repeats. The number is small, which is the point: the argument is usually about effort, and the food it saves is roughly the price of one loaf a week.
Change the single row that breaks a plan rather than the plan. Moving one recipe to the evening a cook is free fixes more than swapping a menu, and assigning the cupboard check to a named person removes a purchase. If neither plan survives, shrink the experiment to one meal, keep one list between both shoppers as in one shopping list for changing plans, and check the pack arithmetic separately using when pack sizes do not fit your household.
Afterwards, put the prediction and what happened side by side: which slot was tight, which purchase went unused, who did work that never reached the table. Keeping the familiar plan is a result, provided the reason is written down.
Sources
- UK Food Waste & Food Surplus – Key Facts, July 2025Accessed September 17, 2026
- Date marking and food waste preventionAccessed September 17, 2026