Waste

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.

ISBN 0141036346   Pages 480 ISBN13 9780141036342 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 524 Publisher Penguin Books Ltd   Published in London Imprint Penguin Books Ltd   Height (mm) 198 Format Paperback   Width (mm) 129 Publication date 02 Jul 2009   Spine width (mm) 26 DEWEY 338.19   Academic level Tertiary education, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

		List of Illustrations
		Introduction
Pt. I		Perishing Possessions
1		Liber-ate		3
2		Supermarkets		24
3		Manufacturers		42
4		Selling the Sell-By Mythology		60
5		Watching Your Wasteline		68
6		Losing Ground: Some Environmental Impacts of Waste		86
Pt. II		Squandered Harvests
7		Farming: Potatoes Have Eyes		99
8		Fish: The Scale of Waste		124
9		Meat: Offal isn't Awful		139
10		Moth and Mould: Waste in a Land of Hunger		148
11		The Evolutionary Origins of Surplus		169
12		Adding It All Up and Asking...'What if?'		184
Pt. III		Where There's Muck There's Brass
13		Reduce: Food is for Eating		199
14		Redistribute: The Gleaners		220
15		Recycle: Compost and Gas		232
16		Omnivorous Brethren: Pigs and Us		243
17		Islands of Hope: Japan, Taiwan and South Korea		260
18		Action Plan: A Path to Utrophia		286
		Afterword		294
Appendix		Graphs, Tables, Maps and Data		299
		Abbreviations		313
		Notes		315
		Bibliography		383
		More...

Passionate, closely argued and guaranteed to make the most manic consumer peer guiltily into the recesses of their fridge.--John Preston

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