Robin Brown

There’s always a little somersault in the pit of my stomach whenever I see someone’s name trending in Twitter’s most popular topics.

The column on the right-hand side of Twitter’s page relates the most popular mentions over the millions of Twitter accounts globally. If something gets in there, it’s big news.

This means that the first inkling of a celebrity death is likely to come from Twitter trending topics as rumours and news stories get retweeted and people start tweeting their sadness. Sad tweets.

I learned of the deaths of Mollie Sugden, Sir Bobby Robson and JG Ballard this way, and today spotted Patrick Swayze and Keith Floyd’s names in the list.

Kanye West’s frequent appearances in trends is always a false dawn, however.

I assumed Floyd was up there because of his rather depressing appearance in the Keith Allen documentary last night, but it appears that he’s shuffled off to the great kitchen in the sky.

I loved Floyd as a youngster, and could probably say that he stirred my early interesting in cooking. Finally someone who talked about food as if it was enjoyable and fun.

He always reminded me of the kind of family friend who have a sense of danger about them – they could swear at any moment and they smelled of booze and fags. Other adults disapprove, but kids loved old soaks.

We shared a love for The Stranglers. He went as far as having two of their tunes as his shows’ title music. Brilliant!

TV chefs these days revere Floyd, and rightly, but he seemed rather disappointed by them – blaming himself for the rise of the modern TV celebrity chef.

It couldn’t happen these days. Guys like Ramsey may swear and shout, but they tend to revel in a weird kind of puritanical discipline. No fun.

Hellraisers and TV drunks seemed to go out of fashion after the 80s, after which they seemed to crawl away to go bankrupt, get involved in unseemly drunken incidents and develop various illnesses. Finally they keel over, generally in penury.

But Floyd was a glorious product of the time, when a sozzled BBC producer can get his sozzled restauranteur mate a show on the Beeb because he thinks he’s funny.

I’ll raise a glass of wine to Keith, and pop on a Stranglers CD while I cook tonight. But I’ll just have the one.

I have, in my time, witnessed an extraordinary range of reactions to my asking for a doggy bag in a restaurant, following a half-demolished meal.

Embarrassment, bemusement, horror and a kind of appalled fascination are among the most common (although never from restaurant staff). I simply don’t understand why this is.

Neither, would it seem, does Huge Fearnley-Wotsisface, who has urged British diners to take their leftovers home with them. This should come as no surprise – Huge can regularly be seen scavenging food from bins, eating dirt with his fingers and picking up dog turds from pavements to put in his paprikash.

I exaggerate, but only by a little. Hugh probably takes any leftover bones home to make a stock. In fairness, though, why not? We throw away 20m tonnes of perfectly good food a year, a sickening stat when people still starve to death elsewhere in the world.

People wasting food makes my hair stand up on end, as I was brought up boiling up chicken carcasses, frying left over mashed potato and chucking a week’s worth of leftovers into a frying pan with some rice.

I take leftover food from restaurants that I intend to eat at a later date, but I’ll even take meat fat for my cat to eat, and bread to feed some nearby ducks – if there are any.

Frankly this is how it should be. Apart from it being blinding common sense, many of the problems associated with climate change – desertification, forest and bog clearance, and rapidly climbing amounts of methane in the atmosphere – can be directly attributed to our rapacious consumption.

And just as energy and water security issues are coming to light now, so will food security in the coming decade, as Western world ships all of its wheat production to volatile Ukraine – an acknowledged likely flash-point in any new global skirmish.

So, as the evidence mounts, it becomes not only a matter of common sense to ask for a doggy bag, it’s become a moral imperative.

It’s not that long since David Attenborough called for a return to ‘waste-not-want-not’ values to combat climate change.

And he should know a thing or two about the environmental problems the planet faces due to our obscene appetites, having spent 50 years schlepping around the globe staring at ants.

Why aren’t we teaching this in schools? Why, with my limited ability in the kitchen, am I pretty much the best person at cooking I know? And why on Earth wouldn’t people take home the expensive food they’ve paid for?

So, save some cash and save the world. Ask for a doggy. And, if possible, ask for the leftovers of the fat bloke next to you who only ate half of his steak. If you don’t want it my cat will give it a good home.

• Image by auxesis via Creative Commons

• A thousand apologies for the made-you-look header. I just couldn’t think of anything else.