Book description
With shortages, volatile prices and nearly one billion people
hungry, the world has a food problem - or thinks it does.
Farmers, manufacturers, supermarkets and consumers in North America
and Europe discard up to half of their food - enough to feed all the
world's hungry at least three times over. Forests are destroyed and
nearly one tenth of the West's greenhouse gas emissions are released
growing food that will never be eaten. While affluent nations throw
away food through neglect, in the developing world crops rot because
farmers lack the means to process, store and transport them to market.
But there could be surprisingly painless remedies for what has
become one of the world's most pressing environmental and social
problems. Travelling from Yorkshire to China, from Pakistan to Japan,
and introducing us to foraging pigs, potato farmers, freegans and food
industry directors, Stuart encounters grotesque examples of
profligacy, but also inspiring innovations and ways of making the most
of what we have. Combining front-line investigation with startling new
data, Waste shows how the way we live now has created a global
food crisis - and what we can do to fix it.
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
, 'a genuinely revelatory contribution to the history of human ideas'
(
Daily Telegraph
), was published in 2006. He lives in the UK.
