People should use common sense when it comes to judging whether or not food is safe to eat, a senior minister has said. In other words, the “best before” date may have reached its sell by date.

A good thing, too. Estimates show that we currently waste 6.7 million tons of food each year. That’s £10bn spent on things we don’t eat.

Best before dates are supposed to tell us when a food is in its optimum condition. The sell by date tells us when it is – apparently – no longer safe to eat.

We’ve all walked past the reduced section in supermarkets and seen perfectly edible food at a greatly reduced prices. There’s nothing wrong with this food, it won’t poison you, and yet, because it has reached its best before date they’re trying to get rid of it – and quickly.

The result is nice if you are on a budget, but it highlights how much of our food gets wasted each year. That carton of soup doesn’t fill with anthrax as the chimes of midnight fade away on the best before date.

Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, is calling for a bit more personal responsibility when it comes to our food. He thinks we can probably forget about the best before date and work out for ourselves if something is going to be safe to eat.

He’s also keen to see Britain become more self-sufficient in terms of the food we produce. At the moment the country produces only 61 per cent of the food it eats. Mr Benn wants to see that figure rise.

Now, this is interesting to anyone with even a passing interest in the countryside.

For the past few years those in charge have appeared hell-bent on concreting over anything that’s green. We’ve had roads and new housing estates and an obesession with out-of-town shopping centres which has – one could argue – fired many a (imported) nail into the coffins of our town centres.

So, now we appear to be going back to farming, growing more of our crops and making sure we eat what we buy.

Meanwhile, its estimated that our population is going to hit 70 million in the next couple of decades – so that’s more land needed to build more homes to house more people. But at the same time we appear to want more land to grow more crops to feed more people. Which takes priority?

Sometimes, you wonder if the right hand knows what the left is doing.