Source A: What we leave behind

At first, I thought the answer to food waste was simple: buy less, throw away less. I said it with the confidence of someone who had just cleared out a cupboard and found three tins past their best-before dates. The bin looked like a verdict. I had made a careless choice; I should make a better one.

Then I began helping at the Saturday market. At closing time, one stallholder handed over a crate of apples, bruised but sound. Another had bread that would not last until the next market. Their faces were not careless. They were tired, counting the day’s losses, trying to decide what could be carried, stored or given away before the lights went out. A rule that sounds easy in a kitchen can become less simple when the choice is made at the end of a long working day.

I still think our own habits matter. I have watched a family buy more than it could use because the shelves made abundance look ordinary. But habits do not grow in empty rooms. We choose from what is offered, at the prices we can manage, with the time we have. Shops decide what to order and what to do with what remains. Councils decide what collection services are available. None of those choices cancels the others.

So perhaps the bin is not a verdict after all. It is a record: of a decision made at home, but also of the choices that came before it. A crate of apples can be rescued by a neighbour, a stallholder or a collection scheme; it can also be left until there is no time to rescue it. We should ask what each of us can change, and who else needs to act. The answer is not to stop looking at our own habits. It is to look beyond them.