With Christmas around the corner, food is becoming a focal point of our lives. The supermarket shelves are brimming with special offers; you can’t help succumbing to the scent of cinnamon and chocolate emanating from the Christmas market stalls – our store cupboards and fridges are beginning to overflow.

But amongst all the hustle and bustle and festivities, the back of the fridge gets forgotten, the 2kg bag of once-juicy oranges have turned grey and the biscuits aren’t quite as crispy as they were a couple of days ago. And in a week’s time, your mum is bound to give you a two-week supply of left-over turkey that may well suffer a similar fate.

It’s easy to come up with examples of how we hoard food we’ll never eat and throw away in the end. We’re probably all guilty of wasting food at times. Perhaps that’s why you voted for “Eat Up” to be our next DoAction, which aims to encourage people to be more conscious of how much food they buy and how they use it.

In researching this new DoAction, I came across some pretty sad facts: on average, a quarter of our food ends up in landfill. And that’s just from us, as consumers. We’re not even talking about what the producers and retailers throw out…

Maybe Eat Up is just the nudge you or one of your friends need to change their habits.

My housemate, for example, stores his cheese and mushrooms in the cupboard because he thinks it’s more important his sixpack of Guinness is kept cool in the small fridge (even though, with a dysfunctional heating, it’s cold enough in our flat to keep drinks cool anywhere). You don’t want to preach; but asking your friends to support you with a DoAction is not only a great way to get the message across in a subtle and friendly way, but it also makes them actually get on and Do it too…

So go on, sign up to Do a challenge in the New Year, and nudge your friends to Eat Up in return.