The amount of bread alone that Britain wastes each month would fill St Paul's Cathedral. And we throw away enough food each year that would fill Wembley Stadium nine times over.
These are the shocking statistics being highlighted this week by the charity Tearfund in its #RenewOurFood campaign to try and reduce food waste.
Celebrity baker Tom Herbert along with Bishop of Islington Ric Thorpe visited St Paul's Cathedral this morning to call on consumers to follow Jesus' example in John 6:12: 'Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.'
Supermarkets are being asked to halve their food waste and produce a plan to show how they'll achieve this.
Tom, one half of Channel 4's Baker Brothers, said: 'It's incredible to think that we waste enough bread to fill this huge cathedral every month.
'I'm astonished that while so many people in the world are going hungry we're throwing all of this perfectly edible food away. The UK wastes 10 million tonnes of food every year and we know that around 60 per cent of this could be avoided.
'Jesus told us not to waste food. He is lavishly generous in the feeding of the 5,000, and yet crucially concerned that nothing goes to waste.
'The leftovers were a vital part of the story, and they need to be part of our story too. Together we can gather up the pieces by pledging to reduce our food waste and asking our supermarkets to do the same.'
He said supermarkets have a responsibility too.
'We want them to at least halve their food waste by 2030 and give us a plan as soon as possible to show how they'll achieve that.'
The campaign against food waste is part of Tearfund's Renew Our World project which is tackling climate change.
Wasting food has a big carbon footprint, making climate change worse and leading to more droughts, floods and less reliable rain, leaving people in poorer countries struggling to feed themselves, according to Tearfund. The UN has set a global target to halve food waste by 2030.
Bishop Thorpe said: 'Every day Christians across the world pray for their daily bread. That's why it's so important that we're not wasting the resources that we have.'
Tearfund's senior campaigner Clare Lyons said: 'Nobody likes seeing food go to waste – yet a third of all food grown in the world is never eaten. This can't be right, particularly when producing food that we will not end up eating generates huge amounts of greenhouse gas, which makes life harder for people in poorer countries due to climate change. If everyone in the UK stopped throwing away food we could make a real difference, it would be the environmental equivalent of taking one in four cars off the road.
'Reducing our food waste is something simple we can all do to help people facing the impacts of climate change every single day.
'Apart from the environmental benefits and helping those in poverty if we stopped wasting food we could save £470 a year per household. It just makes so much sense.'
Tearfund is hosting a number of food waste feasts across the UK where people will come together to tuck into meals cooked with produce that would have otherwise ended up in the bin.
