We learn this week that we in the UK throw away approximately a third of all the food we buy: a staggering 6.7 million tonnes a year. While most of this is unavoidable – bones, cores and peelings – almost a quarter of the 4.1 million tonnes of avoidable food waste is thrown away whole, untouched or unopened. Of this, at least 340,000 tonnes is still in date when thrown away and a further 1.2 million tonnes is simply left on our plates.

The research, published by WRAP, is almost unbelievable. Yet, if it is true that the average household throws away £420 worth of good food a year and the average household with children throws away £610 worth, perhaps this is simply symptomatic of our throw away society.

For this is not merely a story of energy wasted producing, storing, transporting, and disposing of food. Whereas in days gone by, things were built to last and broken appliances were repeatedly repaired, today we all too easily throw away, replace and upgrade household appliances, mobile phones, and computers - even when they are still in good working order. Most damagingly, our consumerism extends to the lives of those around us. The increasingly dominant elderly section of the population is hidden away in care homes. Ever growing numbers of prisoners are locked away in cells and afforded no opportunity for training, rehabilitation or treatment. Troubled teenagers are dismissed as lost causes. And trends such as declining marriage rates (the lowest rate since records began almost 150 years ago), the ease with which people increasingly resort to divorce (45% of marriages are now expected to end in divorce), and the astonishing proportion of children now born outside of marriage (a majority of those born to British-born mothers) or living in single-parent families (more than a quarter) seem to indicate that commitment to spouse and children is a thing of the past.

If we are to have any hope of reversing such trends, we must rediscover those most precious of commodities, upon which all that we most value depend: love, time and relationships.