Waste

(book, Tristram Stuart)

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h4. From the publisher

With shortages, volatile prices, and nearly 1 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.

Waste traces the problem around the globe, from the top to the bottom of the food-production chain. Stuart’s journey takes him from the streets of New York to China, Pakistan, Japan, and back to his home in England. Introducing us to foraging pigs, potato farmers, and food industry CEOs, Stuart encounters grotesque examples of profligacy, but also inspiring innovations and ways of making the most of what we have. The journey is a personal one, as Stuart is a dedicated freegan, who has chosen to live off of discarded or self-produced food in order to highlight the global food-waste scandal.

Combining frontline 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.