“Everywhere I looked, we were hemorrhaging food,” said Tristram Stuart, English author and food waste activist, in a 2014 interview with National Geographic.

This is exactly what the reader discovers in Stuart’s book, Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal.  Published in 2009, Waste is an accessible and extremely relevant read, credited with galvanizing public awareness around the issue of food waste. In this comprehensive, well-developed and well-researched book, Stuart does not simply explain why food waste is a problem. He makes clear why food waste and its social, economic, and environmental consequences should concern us all. 

Globally, one third of the food we produce is wasted, even as one billion people face malnourishment. Research suggests that food waste from the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union alone could feed those one billion people several times over. He does not use the term ‘scandal’ lightly, as wasted food and the processes that lead to it are unethical.

Most believe that consumers are the sole contributor to food waste. However, Stuart discovers that they are only a fraction of the problem; most food waste actually occurs along the supply chain. This is largely due to the lack of efficient storage facilities in the developing world, supermarkets’ overstocking policies, manufacturers’ sell-by and use-by dates as well as supermarkets’ unethical trading practices with manufacturers. 

Stuart paints supermarkets as being amoral. According to Stuart, many large supermarkets use their buying power to set profitable terms and conditions for themselves, with their suppliers getting the short end of the stick. Supermarket chains will intentionally forgo signing contracts with their manufacturers so that they will be able to retract what they offer to pay the manufacturer initially. Additionally, they will over order food and then only pay for a portion of that food, leaving the suppliers to deal with the leftovers. Usually, these leftovers are thrown away because the supplier is unable to sell them. 

What Stuart found was eye-opening; many large supermarkets (and even the smaller ones) in the UK were reluctant to provide him with information on how much food is wasted annually. These same stores were also unwilling to offer their surplus food to food banks and charities. Where Stuart couldn’t get statistics, he took pictures. In his book, he provides this visual evidence of the food that the supermarkets throw out, including photos where blue dye had been sprayed onto perfectly good food, so no one would be able to consume it. 

The dilemma isn’t limited to food waste,  Stuart points out. Food waste represents a colossal waste of resources. Seventy percent of freshwater consumption is used by the agricultural industry, but over forty percent of the fruits, vegetables, and grains produced are wasted. Food waste also has adverse environmental impacts; not only does food waste emit methane when it is landfilled, but inefficient production and overproduction lead to inefficient land use and worsens deforestation. This leads to habitat loss and in some cases,  ecosystem collapse.

This is a depressing portrait of the scale of food waste. However, sprinkled throughout Waste are glimmers of hope from around the world. In Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan there are strict food waste laws. Food recycling laws in Taiwan and South Korea prohibit food from any source ending up in landfills. Instead, food waste is either composted or fed to animals. In 2001, Japan passed the Food Waste Recycling Law, which requires food businesses to recycle forty-eight percent of their food waste by 2006. By 2005, Japanese businesses were leading the effort to mitigate food waste and recycled over sixty percent of their waste. As of 2019, Japan generated 6 million tons of food waste, only a tenth of the United States’ food waste. Recently, Japan also passed a new food waste reduction law that encourages businesses, governments and consumers to work together to curb the country’s food waste. It’s clear food waste reduction is of high priority for Japan. 

In addition to hope, Stuart offers practical solutions that both corporate-run supermarkets and governments can take to reduce food waste. He calls for supermarkets to “stop throwing away food” unnecessarily and to follow an enforced code of practice to shield suppliers from unfair practices. There is no code of practice in the United States, however there is one in the United Kingdom. The Groceries Supply Code of Practice (GSCOP) was introduced in 2009 to regulate the relationship between supermarkets and their suppliers. He suggests that governments establish mandatory food waste reduction targets on food companies (like in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan) and avoid farm subsidies based on production, which usually lead to an excess of food. 

In 2009, the shock value of Waste was high; however, the publication did little to stem the tide of excess food waste. The numbers have only gotten worse.