You’re baking a cake, and forgot to buy cream for the ganache. The tub you already have in the fridge expired two days ago, but looks and smells fine. Can you use it?

Most people’s first instinct is to chuck it, but our best-be-on-the-safe side approach to food is creating landfill and costing us dollars.

In Australia, OzHarvest estimates that $8 to 10 billion worth of food is wasted each year.

To combat the problem in America, the United States Department of Agriculture has released FoodKeeper, a free app on iTunes and Android that tells you whether to keep or throw out different food items.

You just search for the food type and the app will tell you whether or not to observe the best-before date, how to store and if it’s bad, how to compost it.

It even syncs up with your calendar to make supermarket shopping a breeze and send alerts when you need to use something up, plus even offers a virtual helper interface.

Closer to home, Love Food, Hate Waste also has plenty of tips and guides for how to properly store and keep food, and what to do with it once it’s past its prime.