Times are hard for everyone. The price of everything is rocketing up (except for the stuff in the shops that the retailers ordered before the credit crunch and are now trying to offload before the concept of a shopping centre full of consumers becomes too much of a withering memory).

Last night TFC went to Pizza Express with his family, as part of his weekly "absolving of guilt" for not being too clever around the cooker. When TFC was a child at home with his parents, eating out was reserved for birthdays, although sometimes fish and chips did make it through the door. Ah, the luxury of food.

So TFC has an attitude to food of "clearing the plate" especially when paying someone else to provide a platter in the first place. So TFC has been known to get irritated by his 6 year old eating like a pigeon, his 12 year old leaving the edges of pizza and his wife only eating at most 3/4 of anything put in front of her.

"Don't be such a dad" is the usual comment. But I suppose that the "eat up" value is embedded in TFC's working class roots, rather than him being a miser - although he does begrudge £15 worth of a 60 quid dinner bill going straight in the bin.

So what has this got to do with anything CSR? Well. Everyone, whether at work or at home, or on Watford High Street, should consider the supply chains that exist around us all. Simply put, if we take an attitude of excess and a dismissive view towards creating waste, we will run out of what we need more quickly than even the gloom merchant who writes this column expects.

Gordon Brown has called for "prudence in the kitchen", given that we throw away an average of £420 worth of food every year (according to the front page of The Mail - NB it is lying on a table of a coffee shop and will remain there afterwards). Brown reckons that 4.1 million tons of grub that could be eaten if we were a bit more sensible in the supermarket aisles, gets thrown in our bins. That's a third of what we buy - no wonder the supermarket economy is still booming!

So the price of beef and pork will rise by 20% by 2018, sugar and rice 30% and wheat and maize 40%, butter 60% and veg oil by 80%.  Ok so putting all our fruit and veg in the fridge is probably a sensible idea Mr Brown, but let's face it, we need global solutions that are underpinned by new economic structures. Will be interesting to see what the great global talking shop that is the G8 summit comes up with. (Speaking of which it was good to see that the Tories have picked up on TFC's suggestion for fuel tax - being reduced as prices rise).

Enough of this doom and gloom, TFC is off to buy a shed full of tinned fruit. After all, one day TFC's unborn grandchildren may want to taste an apple - the way food prices are going a vintage 2008 can of tinned fruit may be the only way that anyone will be able to afford that luxury. By that time I'm sure we will all be "eating" spaceman style protein mush squeezed from a tube and "eating out" will be a cultural dinosaur anyway.