Book review: Waste: Uncovering The Global Food Scandal

MOST of us can remember being told as children to finish our suppers because "there are people starving in Africa". It was a slightly crass yet truthful rebuke dished out by the post-Second World War generation who, after experiencing rationing, still possessed a sense of gratitude for whatever food was put on their plates. Unfortunately those lessons of thrift and appreciation of life's most precious commodity are long forgotten as journalist Tristram Stuart discovers through his research for Waste.

It is now second nature for Britons and members of other developed nations to throw out perfectly good food. There may be a billion undernourished people on this planet, yet UK households choose to toss out 4.1 million tonnes of edible food every year. Around four million people living on our own doorstep in Britain are unable to access a nutritious diet, but UK retailers waste an estimated 1.6 million tonnes of food annually, and a further 5.8 million tonnes is frittered away by the food manufacturing industry.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that if Western consumers and industries changed their flippant attitude towards food, there's a good chance that global starvation and malnutrition could be banished.

Over the past ten years, environmental groups have succeeded in making consumers think twice every time they pick up a plastic bag at the supermarket or fail to put their newspaper in the recycling bin.

Stuart aims to induce a similar revolution in consumer thinking about food. We may not realise it when we relieve our refrigerators of a wilted lettuce or leave a few chips on our plate, but we are contributing to a growing food mountain in Britain. This, according to Stuart, has not only social but serious environmental consequences. It is estimated that food consumption is responsible for between 26 and 50 per cent of manmade emissions. Like that period during the immediate post-war years, Stuart wants it to become socially unacceptable to waste food.

Although consumers are the biggest contributing sector to Britain's food mountain, the author saves most of his scorn for retailers. He converted to freeganism – the movement whose acolytes survive on discarded food – during his schooldays, and has since spent years studying the contents of retailers' skips, from well-known sandwich chains to the big four supermarkets. The revelations of this chapter are perhaps the most eye-opening of all. He asserts that in a single day one store can throw out enough food to feed 100 people.

Although several leading supermarket chains such as Sainsbury's participate in schemes whereby some unsold food is donated to homeless charities, Stuart calculates that this is only a tiny proportion of their overall food waste. In most companies, he says, it is judged to make better business sense to toss perfectly good food into the bin than to give it away for free after the shop closes its doors. This is because the mark-up on many items is so high that retailers would rather overstock than forgo a possible sale. Many store managers work on the premise that it is better to waste two or three of each product than to risk losing out on the sale of one by selling out of it.

Stuart discovered that some firms are also frightened that if they start giving food away for free, their regular customers will stop paying for their sandwiches, sushi and ready meals. In one particularly shocking example, several outlets of a well-known sandwich chain started opening their unsold sandwiches before tipping them into the bin, forcing the freegans and homeless people who used to retrieve the sandwiches from their rubbish to scrape around in the dirt for the pieces of bread and other nourishment they had come to rely on.

Stuart evidently has an axe to grind and some of his calculations are based on assumptions and the research of other groups with obvious agendas. Sometimes his emotive language is reminiscent of the far left-wing press, particularly when he accuses us of behaving "murderously" towards fellow humans when we don't finish what is on our plates.

But overall, Waste is an extremely thought-provoking, passionate study which could make even the biggest sceptic think twice before putting the leftovers in the bin. Stuart, who will appear at Edinburgh Book Festival this summer, lives and breathes his subject matter and Waste is – unusually for the publishing industry – printed on 100 per cent recycled paper.

I may have found Waste a little statistics-heavy at times, but I finished my supper that evening.