Britain is a nation of wasters who throw out hundreds of pounds of food each year, a new study has suggested.
Despite a tightening of purse strings, the average person still bins £400 worth a perishables from one year to the next.
And where previous generations would have saved every last morsel, more than half of those polled (56%) admitted discarding bread every week.
Meanwhile, more than a third said they threw out bananas on a regular basis or disposed of bagged salads which go uneaten.
However the study of more than 3,000 adults identified something of a gender divide - only 1% of women said they binned chocolate compared with 3% of men.
Despite a wasteful mentality, the study found most people (73%) felt guilty for allowing food to go off.
And some 60% said they would pack up their leftovers for lunch, while 92% said they reused shopping bags.
On a regional level, those who claim to be the least wasteful were found to live in Essex where only 2% of people admitted throwing out items every day.
The worst offenders for this were in Brighton where 16% of people put their hands up to binning uneaten food while this figure was slightly lower in London, at 13%.
The study was carried out by OnePoll for Waitrose earlier this month.
The items most frequently binned each week are:
- Bread
- Bananas
- Bagged Salads
- Lettuce
- Cold Meats
- Apples
- Milk
- Yoghurt
- Cucumber
- Potatoes
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