Waste

Uncovering the Global Food Scandal

Tristram Stuart

Waste asks the crucial question: how can the world's mountain of surplus food be reduced?

Waste is both a personal journey over the world's food waste mountain and an objective investigation of this environmental and social problem. Tristram Stuart seeks the reasons why North America and Europe waste 30-50 per cent of their food. The fresh produce discarded by farmers, manufacturers, supermarkets and consumers would feed approximately 700 million humans - the total number of starving people in the world six times over. While affluent nations throw away food through neglect, up to 30-40 per cent of some crops in the developing world are wasted because farmers lack the basic infrastructure to process and store them before they rot. Terrible though it may seem, the global food waste problem is also a great opportunity - tackling it is easy. Unlike giving up air travel for the sake of the planet, avoiding food waste can be achieved without much sacrifice.

During his travels from Yorkshire to western China, Pakistan to Japan, Stuart encounters grotesque examples of profligacy, but also inspiring and innovative solutions. In the Uighur restaurateur who scolds him for not licking his rice-bowl clean and the Korean pig farmer who fattens swine on people's leftovers, Stuart finds grounds for optimism. As a schoolboy Stuart raised pigs on kitchen waste; as an adult he challenged supermarket bosses over the contents of their bins. Combining fifteen years of campaigning with the analytical skills demonstrated in his acclaimed history, The Bloodless Revolution, Stuart's new work is a prescient and incisive polemic. Waste is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand and remedy the current global food crisis.

Tristram Stuart has been a freelance writer for Indian newspapers, a project manager in Kosovo and a prominent critic of the food industry. He has made regular contributions to television documentaries, radio and newspaper debates on the social and environmental aspects of food. His first book, The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India, was published in 2006 to great critical acclaim.