Don’t be shy about asking for a doggy bag: you deserve a round of applause

I still remember the fluttering heart and dry mouth the first time I plucked up the courage to ask a waiter for a doggy bag, after 20 fruitless minutes chasing some deliciously spicy boiled peanuts round a plate in a Sichuan restaurant. They looked at me oddly, but the nuts duly appeared in a takeaway box, for me to gleefully hoover up with my fingers on the bus home.

These days, on the odd occasion when I don’t finish everything in sight, I feel no shame at all in asking, or indeed in wrapping stuff in a napkin and shoving it in my bag – which is as it should be, given that we waste 10.2m tonnes of food a year in this country, and every little helps.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs yesterday announced that as part of plans to tackle this, it will be considering measures including forcing restaurants to give people the chance to take their leftovers home with them – something that is already in the pipeline in France, the spiritual home of the snooty waiter, where this will become law in 2021. Supermarkets are also likely to be asked to look at ways to cut their food waste, and both may be asked to redistribute excess to relevant charities … although presumably not the stuff from diners’ plates.

The only argument against the practice I’ve heard with any merit is that restaurants lose control over the food once it has left their premises – several people tell me they have been refused rice, in particular, because of the dangers of reheating it more than once. The restaurant PR Hugh Richard Wright, who has represented some of London’s best-known names, has worked with restaurants in the past with such a policy. “As with so many things that feel like ‘health and safety gone mad’, the blame lies with the minority of litigious or vexatious diners who make operators’ lives a misery. The sensible, capable-of-cooking-rice-properly majority suffer the consequences.”

Sometimes it is other diners who make things difficult. Janet Street-Porter recently told the audience of ITV’s Loose Women: “I generally don’t take a doggy bag and I look down slightly on people who do.” The restaurant critic Tim Hayward dismisses such snobbery. “Surely the only possible objection would have been a sort of Nicky Haslam notion that it made you look poor or desperate,” he says, “but these days asking to take food home should get you a spontaneous round of applause in any restaurant anywhere.”

If you do feel self-conscious, however, take a tip from the restaurateur Russell Norman: “Just lie and say it’s for your dog,” he says. I can confirm this works almost every time – and sometimes, it’s even true. Not often, though. Sorry, Wilf, but some steaks are just too good to share.