Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal - Softcover

Tristram Stuart

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141036346 ISBN 13: 9780141036342

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Shocking Facts from Tristram Stuart’s Waste:

• Around half all food in the US is wasted, while 35 million people live in households that do not have reliable access to food.
• The US has more than 4 times the amount of food required by the nutritional needs of the population.
• Just half of the food currently being thrown away in the US could provide the world’s nearly one billion malnourished people with enough food. If trees were planted on all of the land currently being used to grow unnecessary surplus and wasted food, they could offset between 50 to 100 percent of the world’s man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
• The Amazon rainforest is currently being destroyed to make room for grazing and soy production to supply the world’s growing demand for meat. The land required to produce just the meat and dairy products wasted each year by U.S. and UK households, retailers and foodservices is seven times the amount of land deforested in Brazil.
• In South Korea, 98 percent of food waste is recycled―being composted or fed to livestock. The exact mirror image prevails in the US where only 2.6 percent of municipal food waste is recycled.

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0141036346
• ISBN 13: 9780141036342
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 451