Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is on a mission to reduce the amount of waste that Britain produces. The good news is that all the British supermarkets make big bold claims about how little waste they produce, but what does it really mean? Hugh joins up with skip divers Sam Joseph and Catie Jarman, on an illicit midnight supermarket bin raid to rescue perfectly edible food that was destined for the dump. If Sam, Catie and Hugh hadn't intercepted it, all this good food would have gone to a place called anaerobic digestion (AD), where food waste is turned into energy. This is fine if it has gone off or spoiled, but surely if it is edible, it should be given to people?
Hugh then finds out that it is not just food coming out the back of the supermarkets that is going to waste. Most of the waste in the supply chain happens before the food even gets to the supermarkets. A national charity has made it their business to intercept as much of this food as they can and redistribute it to charities. They are feeding 80,000 people a day with food that would otherwise get thrown away, but this is only 2% of all the food waste out there. Hugh lays down a challenge to the supermarkets to commit to sending less of their waste to AD, and more to charity.
In his bid to reduce the mountain of food waste that is being generated on Britain's farms due to supermarkets' strict cosmetic standards, Hugh gathers evidence from one farm in Norfolk and prepares to take it to one of the big four supermarkets.
But it's not just food that we're wasting - shocked by how disposable fashion seems to have become, Hugh dumps seven tonnes of clothes in a shopping centre and asks for guesses on how long it takes us to throw away this much stuff. Answers range from three days to six hours but the truth is much much less than this. Yet there is always a better place for our clothes to end up than the bin.
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