Can you imagine what 680,000 tonnes of food looks like? That's the amount wasted in Britain each year, and at the top of the list of wasted foods is... bread.

One of the staples in the British diet, bread is toasted for breakfast, used for sandwiches for lunch and dipped in soups at dinner. Almost everyone in Britain buys bread – from people in the upper crust of society to regular breadwinners who don't have much dough.

Bread is so important to Brits that we use the slang word 'bread' to mean 'money' and the word 'loaf' to mean 'head'. So let's use our loaves to understand why so much bread is wasted!

Even though bread is still selling like hot cakes, the packets are opened but not finished. We often say that half a loaf is still better than none, but it seems people are simply buying much more than they need.

Baker Chris Young suggests that the British aren't using every last crumb because bread is no longer respected: "None of the bread that is thrown away is 'real' bread, homemade or artisan bread."

Eco-campaigner Mark Boyle agrees. "If you make something yourself (…) you don't waste that bread because you know how much energy you've put into it." But although home baking is a nice idea, for many it's biting off more than they can chew. People work such long hours to put bread on the table and simply don't have the time.

Perhaps we British should just invest a little more of our hard-earned bread in buying better loaves. These would make our diet healthier and our bins lighter: healthy, artisan loaves might just be the best thing since sliced bread.