Colm O'Regan: Scientists found a key hormone called drool which counteracts the brain’s ability to do simple sums when ordering a takeaway

We are getting a lot (possibly a sad amount) of joy finishing off leftovers.

It’s part of our central philosophy that anything that makes you smug is good for mental health. The children are still doing their best to keep up the cost of the brown bin, but their leftovers are manky. We should really give them something nicer to eat but they need to have something to moan about from their childhoods or else they’ll have nothing to write columns about in future.

The fridge is full of containers. It looks like the fridge of someone who has suffered a bereavement in The Sopranos and people have kept bringing stuff.

The key to leftovers is to get the stuff out of the pot and into the containers quickly.

If I let the post-meal slump go too long, left overs in pots, they start to haunt me and I try and ‘will’ them into the fridge before eventually despairing, throwing the whole lot, pot and all into a bin-liner, driving to a scrapyard, scrapping the car and getting a taxi home, determined to get a fresh start.

But if I can get the stuff packed away in the fridge, then I’m smug.

I’m even smugger if I have one of those ‘portfolio meals’. This is where you have no original food left and it’s just rifling through the fifteen bits and bobs that are in the fridge or cupboard.

An egg, aged baked beans, a banana, the heel of a black pudding, a thimble of soup, a neglect-dried tomato and a scone.

It doesn’t sound appetising but throw in stale bread — sorry, croutons — an olive and a grape, call it a platter and you can charge yourself €18 and take a filtered photo of it.

Leftovers are also a handy way of justifying an Indian takeaway to yourself.

Scientists have identified a key hormone called drool which acts to counteract the brain’s ability to do simple sums when ordering a takeaway.

That explains why you are constantly surprised by the price when the man from the Bengal Moon delivers it to the door.

You may feel stung by this price. But leftovers can help. Simply start the meal by filling yourself with poppadoms and naan, have a few dips of the korma and then tell yourself you’ll get three more meals out of it. While continuing to eat it all up.

The king of leftovers is the fried spud. Potatoes have their detractors. Some complain about the preparation but they don’t see the benefits of the left-overs.

Perhaps they are still carrying the trauma of the summer days years ago when Mammy announced it was too warm to cook and that “we’ll have something salady”.

Cold spud was served with something called Salad Cream which is what we used to put on salady-things before someone tapped us on the shoulder and reminded us that mayonnaise has existed for a century.

But fry a spud and a whole new world is opened up. One of fry and spud.

And do you know what? The smugness doesn’t end there. Leftovers are another step to doing your bit for the environment. (Obviously apart from divesting from fossil fuels and opting out of the extraction-capitalist treadmill).

But when you throw out food you are throwing out the carbon footprint needed to make it.

So leftover are green. (especially if you leave them for too long)