Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Tristram Stuart

English Author and Campaigner, Received the International Environmental Award and The Sophie Prize

"A country like America has four times the amount of food that it needs."

"33% of the total global food production is fed to the livestock (the maize, the wheat and the soy), but 2/3 of that turns into faeces and heat, while only 1/3 becomes meat and dairy products."

"22% of the total global food production is thrown away directly into supermarket, restaurant and household bins ? this is what most of us think of when we think of food waste"

"A hunk of beef raised on Scottish moorland has a very different ecological footprint from one created in an intensive feedlot using concentrated cereal feed, and a wild venison or rabbit casserole is arguably greener than a vegetable curry."

"A very evident abundance of waste was actually the tip of the iceberg. When you start going up the supply chain, you find where the real food waste is happening on a gargantuan scale."

"A country like America has twice as much food on its shop shelves and in its restaurants than is actually required to feed the American people."

"As a country gets richer, it invests more and more in getting more and more surplus into its shops and restaurants. Most European and North American countries grow and produce twice as much food for nutritional requirements of their populations, or twice as much actually required to feed their populations."

"According to the 'food waste pyramid,' ensuring that food is eaten by people is the top priority. Failing that, the next best thing is to feed it to farm animals."

"As the words of my book, 'The Bloodless Revolution,' accumulated, I envisaged a parallel growth: the stack of pages they would have to be printed on, thousands of times over; every page representing a slice of forest, a belch of fumes and a squirt of toxic ink."

"At the moment, Europe depends on importing millions of tons of soy from South America, where its production contributes to global warming, to deforestation, to biodiversity loss, to feed livestock here in Europe. At the same time we throw away millions of tons of food waste which we could and should be feeding them. If we did that, and fed it to pigs, we would save that amount of carbon."

"But now we are reaching the ecological limits that our planet can bear, and when we chop down forests to grow more and more food, when we extract water from depleting water reserves, when we emit fossil fuel emissions in the quest to grow more and more food, and then we throw away so much of it, we have to think about what we can start saving."

"As human pastoralists discovered 8,000 years ago, raising animals can be an efficient way of harnessing otherwise unusable resources such as grass."

"Every week, I heave open a supermarket skip and find therein a more exotic shopping list of items than I could possibly have invented - Belgian chocolates, ripe bananas, almond croissants, stone-ground raisin bread - often so much it would have fed a hundred people."

"At the moment, we are trashing our land to grow food that no one eats."

"Determining the value of individual texts has been an ideological scuffle in literary criticism for centuries: but the environmental cost of printing them hauls this dispute from the ivory tower into day-to-day decision-making. Is it right to write? The publishing industry is slowly beginning to commit to using sustainably harvested trees."

"Food waste is a problem: not rotten stuff, not stuff beyond the pale, but good, fresh, edible food that is being wasted on a colossal scale."

"Food redistribution is one of the best win-win solutions for food waste avoidance. Food companies can often save money by donating food rather than paying the œ80 or so per tonne in landfill tax and disposal costs."

"Farmers throw away sometimes a third or even more of their harvest because of cosmetic standards and supermarket specifications. All being discarded, perfectly edible, because they?re the wrong shape or size."

"Food redistribution is economically sensible, ecologically pressing, and socially responsible; it is high time food corporations woke up to it and governments started funding the organisations that facilitate it."

"For the sake of the planet we live on, for the sake of our children, for the sake of all the other organisms that share our planet with us, we are a terrestrial animal, and we depend on our land for food."

"Freeganism is an exhibition of the injustice of food waste, and the provision of the solution to food waste, which is simply to sit down and eat food, rather than throwing it away."

"Good food for free has been the holy grail of foragers since our ancestors first climbed down from the trees."

"Heartless though it may seem to some, among the least harmful things to eat are sustainably culled wild animals. In the absence of natural predators, deer populations in parts of Britain have reached such dense numbers that the woodlands they browse fail to regenerate."

"I simply believe food is too good to throw away - and Christmas leftovers can be a gastronomic opportunity for the well-skilled kitchen forager. With a little imagination, there are a million ways to use up leftovers rather than bin them."

"If we didn't needlessly throw so much food away, I'd stop being a freegan."

"In Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, the government in a matter of years has put a lot of energy behind recycling food waste as livestock feed. It's environmentally friendly, it provides cheap livestock feed for the farmers in those parts of the world, and it avoids sending the food waste to landfill."

"I can perfectly well afford to buy food. 'Freeganism' for me is a protest, demonstrating that much of this food should not be in the bin in the first place. There are simple, cost-effective methods of using surplus food for its proper purpose (i.e. eating it), and there are no solid reasons why these should not be practiced on a nationwide scale."

"If you also include the food that people feed to livestock, the maize, the soy, the wheat, that humans could eat but choose to fatten livestock instead to produce increasing amounts of meat and dairy products, what you find is that most rich countries have between three and four times the amount of food that their population needs to feed itself."

"In Kenya, where there isn't the luxury of feeding grains to animals, livestock yield more calories than they consume because they are fattened on grass and agricultural by-products inedible to humans."

"In the United States, under 3 percent of municipal food waste - so that's the food scraps that goes into people's garbage cans - actually gets recycled. If you go to a place like South Korea, the exact reverse is the case. It's about 3 percent that doesn't get recycled."

"It feels like an easy sum to gauge the balance between forests and, say, the proliferating free newspapers that litter our public transport. This noxious combination of words and paper represents a clear-cut crime against the biosphere."

"It is all very well for 2% of the population to live in a monastic state of meatlessness while everyone else gorges their way towards environmental meltdown or the nearest heart clinic. Vegetarianism is good for the willing minority, but not much use as a campaign tool."

"In least developed countries, people are going hungry as a result of a squeeze on global food supplies. We contribute to that squeeze by wasting food. We take food off the market shelves that hungry people depend on."

"Liver, lungs, heads, tails, kidneys, testicles, all of these things which are traditional, delicious and nutritious parts of our gastronomy go to waste."

"Money is a restricting force always. But the voice of small scale farmers has often been ignored."

"It's certainly sobering to think that British consumers waste roughly a quarter of the food we buy. Or to put it another way, we funnel œ12 billion a year from the supermarket through to our rubbish tips, costing each household an average of œ480."

"Of course, I prefer organic farming to chemical-dependent farming, but sometimes absolutist organic prescriptions go too far. I don't even rule out the possibility of genetic modification generating some benign ideas, as long as we can keep them away from monopolists such as Monsanto."

"Most of the food that we throw away is, in fact, fit for human consumption, and that?s only scratching the surface because right the way up the food supply chain, in supermarkets, greengrocers, bakers, in our homes, in factories and farms, we are hemorrhaging out food."

"Of the total global food production 11% is lost before it even leaves the farm due to a problem primarily associated with developing work agriculture, a lack of infrastructure, refrigeration, pasteurization and storage."

"Offal and offcuts such as head and feet can be picked up for next to nothing, and eating them helps to avoid waste."

"Often, farmers have difficulty finding secondary markets for their outgrades and have no choice but to leave fresh produce unharvested to rot in the field. Gleaning Network U.K. coordinates teams of volunteers with willing farmers across the U.K. to direct this fresh surplus produce to charities that redistribute it to people that need it most."

"The earth is capable of feeding everyone."

"The entire world?s food system is connected, and waste in one place will exert pressure on supplies, on resources, and on land which will have a knock-on effect on the system."

"Seasonally ploughing and harvesting crops will mash up a few moles, slice through a burrow of field mice and crush any ground-nesting bird chicks. Far more significant, however, is the creation of the field in the first place: an act that replaces entire ecosystems, along with all their animal inhabitants."

"Once food gets into our fridges, larders and kitchens, ensuring that it gets used up before going off seems like an obvious thing to do - but it's alarming how many millions of tonnes are simply chucked because we don't keep track of the food we've spent our money on."

"Some supermarkets don?t even want to talk about how much food they are wasting ? they lock bins full of food and truck them off to landfill sites."

"Stop wasting food."

"That is not a superlatively efficient use of global resources, especially when you think of the billion hungry people that exist already in the world."

"Supermarkets didn't even want to talk to me about how much food they were wasting. I'd been round the back. I'd seen bins full of food being locked and then trucked off to landfill sites, and I thought, surely there is something more sensible to do with food than waste it."

"That message is, first of all, if you buy food, don't throw it away. And second, let's put pressure on food businesses to withdraw the policies they currently employ that cause all this waste."