Zoe Williams's mouldy baked beans. Photograph: Zoe Williams for the Guardian
Zoe Williams: furry beans
I am not too bad on the obvious rot candidates: meat rarely goes off in my fridge, because I will eat anything, in any condition, whatever it smells like. I have a household hierarchy: the children get the fresh food; food that is past its sell-by date but doesn't yet smell goes to other adults; then I step in for the wilting, the precarious, the mouldy-at-the-edges-but-otherwise-fine … I'm like Dusty Bin. I have a blindspot around cans, however, and have never finished a tin of beans.
Stuart Heritage: stinky chicken
Stuart Heritage's mouldy items. Photograph: Stuart Heritage for the Guardian
I hate waste, to the extent that I'll usually keep stuff until it no longer resembles food (I once found a pepper with a full beard in my fridge, much to the delight of my Instagram followers) but, by chance, the contents of my fridge are largely edible today. The only vaguely disgusting things are a chicken thigh that has been left uncovered for five days, a hard lime, a dodgy banana and something that might have once been a strawberry. The chicken stinks, so I'll throw it out – but I could still get juice out of the lime and eat the banana without much fuss. And the strawberry? I can't rule out the chance of me eating that at some point. Well, everyone loves strawberries, don't they?
Marina O'Loughlin: liquefying cabbage
Marina O'Loughlin's fridge. Photograph: Marina O'Loughlin for the Guardian
Hideous, post-weekend car crash of a fridge, all vodka and experimental Japanese ingredients, trip souvenirs (the Black Forest ham) and a million chilli sauces. The big bowl contains celeriac remoulade, which is going in the bin. And there, lurking on the bottom shelf, are some liquefying carrots and red cabbage designed to get kids to eat vegetables – they'll always eat an Asian-spiced coleslaw – butdestined for the composter in the garden. There's also some chicory, sell-by well past, never liberated from its packaging, that will end up there too. I try not to throw out any food – a legacy from my Italian mother who would freeze single egg whites – but inevitably eyes are bigger than stomachs. Hence the composter, which provided a decent crop of tomatoes this year – some of which are heading back in there as we speak. Which has a certain symmetry, I suppose.
Tim Dowling: rotting apples
I'm not afraid of limp celery or a bendy carrot, but I do have a strong aversion to a past-its-best apple. Thanks to poor rotation, there are always a few gently deliquescing at the bottom of the fruit bowl, threatening to speed up the rot of everything else in there. We have a tortoise who enjoys rotting fruit; unfortunately we have enough rotting fruit to feed nine tortoises. It all gets tossed out periodically, generally when my view of the TV becomes occluded by fruit flies.
Lucy Mangan: ancient haddock
Lucy Mangan's fridge. Photograph: Lucy Mangan for the Guardian
All these plastic boxes are filled with bits of meat, fish, potato and pasta of uncertain age and provenance. Some I remember cooking, some I don't. This is how I have lived ever since I had a child. Before that, meals were either spaghetti bolognese, chicken in a Campbell's Condensed soup or takeaways. It wasn't tasty, nutritious or edifying in any way, but it was efficient. I ate one option til it was gone, then made a batch of the other and did likewise. Then got takeaways until I had time and inclination to begin the cycle again.
Now I have to try to feed the child properly, meals are a bit more varied but my efficiency has gone to cock. You can judge me. I'm too tired to care.
The chicken is three days out of date, but that's well within cookable range here. As I took the picture, I noticed at the back of the fridge some smoked haddock that should have been eaten by 29 June. I deduce that I once had plans for kedgeree. To be honest, I'd still give it a whirl, but my husband insisted on binning it. Probably wise. Christ knows what state the eggs are in. We don't even keep them in the fridge.
Matthew Fort: no waste
I very, very rarely throw anything away. I'm not a food miser, but I can't think of the last thing I chucked out. It's against my religion. I never, ever buy bags of salad. I buy fruit and veg in small quantities. If I see something going off, I cut out the going-off part and eat the rest. I keep old bits of cheese to put into soups. The other day I combined some yoghurt and buttermilk far past their use-by dates, strained them through some muslin and used the resulting novel dairy product on stewed plums, which were also looking a bit tired and emotional. Bloody lovely. The contents of my fridge at the moment are all in perfectly acceptable condition. God's truth.
Hugh Muir: decaying burgers
Hugh Muir's out-of-date burgers. Photograph: Hugh Muir for the Guardian
The problem is not a propensity to waste food, rather a determination not to waste anything. And so there they sit in the freezer: a four-pack ofTesco burgers. Tomato and basil. Slightly greyed, massively unappealing, in their opaque plastic box. They were smuggled in for a teenager's barbecue many months ago, but they weren't nice then and certainly wouldn't be now. So there they sit, decay retarded by ice, but decaying nonetheless. Won't eat 'em, can't bin 'em. Help!
John Crace: soggy cucumber
Today the fridge is at its most virtuous. Monday is dustbin day, so every Sunday night I have a quick rootle round to look for stuff that has gone off. A usual haul throws up some manky bits of lettuce, rotting veg and the odd bit of meat that may or may not have salmonella. Last night's haul was below average. A cucumber that had gone completely soggy and was only held together by its plastic wrapping; it was so rank, I can only assume it had slithered to the back of the salad drawer to escape my attention for several weeks. There was also a heat-up vegetable pot that was bulging dangerously with the build-up of gases. It was tempting to leave it in the fridge, just to see how long it would take to explode. And that was about it. Apart from the endless jars of things that aren't ever going to go off but aren't ever going to be eaten because they look so disgusting. With them, I'm in a stand-off for now.
Michele Hanson: rotting banana
A banana and an apple in Michele Hanson's bath. Photograph: Michele Hanson for the Guardian
I don't like to boast, but there is nothing going off in my fridge. Not a scrap. The wrinkled lemon doesn't count, because I swear I'm going to use it. I give spare salad to the daughter, toast stale bread for the dog, compost all peelings, grow my own grapes and apples, but I do have one rotting banana in the bath. I store my bananas there, because it's the only place the mice can't get them. My friend Rosemary and I feel guilty if we throw the outer leaves of cabbage away. They're very good for soothing engorged breasts. But we're in our 70s. Should we carry them around in case we meet a pregnant woman?
Bim Adewunmi: fuzzy stew
Today my fridge lies unusually empty – I am moving to Berlin for a few months and I've sublet my flat. I always feel terrible about throwing out food. When I was little, my uncle told me that every meal had a hidden blessing, and we had to finish every morsel to guarantee we got it.
But in the days before my departure, I have been forced to chuck out food. Out went the leftover Nigerian spinach stew, fuzzy with age. Also gone was an alarmingly soft red cabbage (I'm no respecter of best-before dates, but 12 August was no match for the crisper drawer) and a wizened old half of lemon. Not too shabby.
Jay Rayner: fermenting sweetcorn
Jay Rayner's fridge. Photograph: Jay Rayner for the Guardian
Like any self-regarding member of the devout middle classes, I like to think we have robust food-waste strategies. Any vegetables left over at the end of the week get blitzed up into what is known as Indeterminate Green Soup, and the few things that can't go in get composted. But I look at this photograph of my fridge and I see other crimes against waste, which keep repeating like bad plots in EastEnders. On the top shelf are two pots: one of olives, which I know have been there too long, and another of cheap hummus, which has been there so long it is developing its own personality. I am not a fan of hummus, cheap or otherwise, so I can claim innocence on this one. It is bought for others. Who then don't eat it. On the middle shelf is sweetcorn, which is odd. We know our kids don't really care for it. And yet we keep buying the bloody stuff, not noticing it is there until the sugars have started to ferment and the packaging has started to bow. We throw it away. And then we buy it again. A few days ago we threw away half a pack of bacon. This, I can say, is an aberration. It is rare for bits of pig to get away without being eaten.
Stuart Jeffries: browning broccoli
Stuart Jeffries' quince jelly. Photograph: Stuart Jeffries for the Guardian
I'm a pitifully mean, deeply anal keeper of food, but my wife is a thrower. Which makes for "interesting" altercations. At the moment, though, I'm winning. Maybe I'm tripping, but the browning broccoli I found at the bottom of the fridge (use by: 8 Oct) is just the thing to dip into the half-used, possibly rancid jar of quince jelly I'd forgotten about that my sister gave me last year (bottling date: 9 April 2012) and had been lurking behind the mustard. Yummy! The "majestic basil" (use by: 13 Oct) is turning black, but there are still some edible leaves and the rest I'll compost. Maybe I should pre-book an ambulance. Milk and yoghurt, boringly, are within their use-by dates. Shame: I do like a brush with danger from dairy.
Felicity Cloake: pink cheese
Felicity Cloake's fridge. Photograph: Felicity Cloake for the Guardian
Thanks to recipe testing, I end up with a lot of weird and wonderful ingredients crammed into the fridge – and, perhaps fortunately, it is not humanly possible for me to eat them all. The last things I threw away were a packet of very furry bird's-eye chillies (there are always far more in the pack than I can use) and some blue cheese that had turned intriguingly pink. I do relish the challenge of turning unpromising leftovers into something delicious, though; there are a couple of rashers of bacon, some wilting spinach, a quarter of a red onion and a bit of cream in there at the moment that seem heaven-sent for a pasta lunch. In fact, maybe I shouldn't have chucked that cheese after all …
Tony Naylor: mouldy ginger
I'm very tight, so I throw little out. Although I did recently have to chuck (an oversight, this) a cucumber that had melted and filled the veg drawer with ectoplasm. There is guaranteed be a bit of ginger in the fridge going slightly mouldy, and there is some coleslaw in there that's a few days over, but it's going to get eaten later – cavalier, I know. As for irregular waste: I buy too many eggs and, occasionally, posh fruit, in the vain hope that one day I'll develop a taste for mangoes. A few weeks later, they're in the bin. Again.
Paula Cocozza: bearded mushrooms
There is half an onion, saved in a spirit of good home economics, but whose layers, dried and separating, are as stark a sign of age as the rings of a tree trunk. The mushrooms are fuzzing up with a haze of white feathery whiskers, which, left unattended, will soon be a full beard. I don't mean to let things ruin. I'm a keeper of spoils by conception, but each week a thrower by trade. Even the best intentions grow mouldy, and many of my best intentions are vegetables. I've had this wilting fennel for 10 days, but I haven't given up on it yet. Somewhere inside is a usable bulb, getting smaller and smaller.
Tom Meltzer: tired salad
Tom Meltzer's fridge contents. Photograph: Tom Meltzer for the Guardian
I let a lot of food go to waste. Today I had a rummage in the fridge for things I needed to throw out. I found two half-full boxes of mushrooms, three unopened yoghurts, a bag of salad, half a pint of milk and the remains of some pasta. Some of it was more than a month past its sell-by date. By my standards, that's quite good. In the past, I've binned whole fishcakes, salmon fillets, unopened jars of pesto and even steaks. In my defence, I live with five other people. It's easy to lose track of what's yours and what isn't. Plus, when you spontaneously cook together, your individual meal plans tend to go out the window.
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