A campaign found that four in ten young people did not know chicken could be safely frozen

Britons throw away the equivalent of 86 million chickens a year — about 235,000 every day — because they are unaware of how to keep the meat properly, according to a campaign group.

The waste equates to one in every ten chickens bought and costs households £660 million a year, almost £30 for every family in the country.

Young people are particularly clueless about how to store poultry, the study by Love Food Hate Waste, a campaign run by Wrap, the anti-waste charity. The campaign said that almost 40 per cent of 18 to 34-year-olds do not know that chickens can safely be put in the freezer for up to a year before being defrosted and cooked as if they had just been bought from