We are throwing away about a month’s worth of grocery shopping every year

Food shopping has become really expensive. It’s eating up an increasing amount of our disposable income.

Safe Food Ireland measured the cost of a “minimum essential healthy food basket” in research published last month.

That’s the minimum needed for a household to live a life with dignity and take part in social norms. The cost of this weekly basket ranges from €61 to €198, depending on your household type. A household of two parents with a child in primary school and one in secondary school is spending €187 a week on groceries. A pensioner living alone spends about €70. Meat, bread and cereals, milk, cheese, eggs, fruit and vegetables account for the largest share of the food basket.

If these costs seem a bit low, it’s probably because the research is based on prices as of March last year. Food prices had increased by 16 per cent in the 24 months to then, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

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And prices have continued on an upward trajectory since. Food price inflation rose to a 20-month high of 5 per cent in August this year, according to Central Statistics Office (CSO) figures.

[ From fish, fruits, beets and grain - the food waste that can do so much moreOpens in new window ]

So your trolley costs even more now. Perhaps your kids are older now too, and that makes a difference. Indeed, the cost of feeding a teenager is more than double the cost of feeding a pre-school child.

You’ll find the exact cost of your weekly grocery shop by looking at the receipt. What’s harder to count is the cost of how much of this food we waste.

The average Irish household bins around €700-worth of food each year, according to Stopfoodwaste.ie. This research was published in 2022, so it would be easy to round this figure up to about €850 now.

Growing, processing and transporting of food all use up a huge amount of resources. If food is wasted, these resources are wasted too

It’s hard to believe we are throwing away about a month’s worth of grocery shopping every year.

Half a litre of sour milk, a bowl of leftover cooked rice, half a tub of yoghurt, a brown banana, two old eggs, a bag of wilted salad, half a stale loaf, leftover lasagne – the average cost of initially buying all of this typical wasted food was about €12.50, Safe Food says. That cost is higher now.

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This may not seem like a lot once-off, but over time, it really adds up. Whatever you throw out is costing you.

We all waste food. The reasons are different for everyone: we buy too much, we prepare too much, plans change, leftovers go off in the fridge, or we don’t use what we already have in the cupboard or freezer and it spoils.

Cooking and serving too much is certainly a factor. How many of us routinely cook too much rice, pasta or spuds? Do your kids routinely leave milk and cereal in the bottom of the bowl?

Irish households threw away an estimated 221,000 tonnes of food in 2023, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). That’s about 120kg of food waste per household, or 43kg per person. That comes in at an annual national cost of €1.29 billion in food waste.

Pricey groceries look like they are here to stay, but we can try to fight back with more considered meal planning, shopping, cooking and storage. StopFoodWaste.ie has some good tips on this.

If you hit the aisles without a shopping list you can end up buying more of what you already have, so that it gets forgotten or ends up going off.

[ Buy, eat, bin, repeat - we are locked in a never-ending flow of wasteOpens in new window ]

If you’re in the habit of cooking too much rather than risk having too little, with the leftovers going unused, that’s costing you too.

Growing, processing and transporting food all uses up a huge amount of resources. If food is wasted, these resources are wasted too. Food waste is a significant contributor to climate change, generating about 10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions that warm the planet.

So: food waste is a big problem both for your pocket and the planet. Small changes to how we manage our food can make a big difference to how much we spend on food – and how much of it we waste.