GASTRO-X

Demo

What’s for dinner?

A kitchen like the ones in our study, stocked from what households buy and what they throw away. Cook dinner for two with what you find.

In the EU, households throw away about 70 kg of food per person a year: more than half of all food waste (Eurostat, 2022 data).

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Choose a kitchen
How the score works

The score is the study’s waste-weighted use index. Every food carries a weight: the chance that it ends up in the bin if dinner does not use it. Food that is sprouting, wilting or going stale, food with a use-by date tomorrow, opened perishable packs and yesterday’s leftovers count fully (weight 1). Everything else counts by how often UK households throw that food away: about 0.41 for potatoes, 0.26 for bread, 0.05 for milk. The score is the weighted share of the kitchen that dinner uses, counting “part of it” as half.

The weight of dinner is a rough estimate from typical pack sizes. Above 2 kg it is more than two people would eat; the study uses the same threshold to check that a high score does not come from cooking everything at once.

How a kitchen is stocked

  1. Shelves. Every kitchen has the same 19 places: bread, a cake or pizza, two staples, three meats, a fish, three dairy items, two fruits, four vegetables, a tin or frozen bag, a sauce or snack. A fixed layout keeps kitchens comparable across countries.
  2. What people buy. Each place is filled by a weighted draw from national household budget statistics: the more households spend on a food, the more often it turns up. The draw is repeated hundreds of times and one of the most typical kitchens is kept.
  3. What people throw away. Six foods are then put at risk, drawn in proportion to how much of each food households waste: salad, potatoes and bread far more often than rice or milk.
  4. A leftover. Cooked food is one of the largest shares of household food waste, so every kitchen also has yesterday’s leftovers.

The 20 kitchens used in the study were drawn once, in advance, with the same rules, and are not shown here. Sources: DEFRA Family Food (UK, 2024/25), Destatis EVS 2018 (Germany), Statistics Poland Household Budget Survey 2024, ISTAT household expenditure and price basket 2025 (Italy), Eurostat HICP item weights, WRAP household food waste in the UK 2022. Quantities are typical shop packs. The code is open and will be released with the benchmark.