Book review: Waste

"Lectures on waste are ubiquitous in the modern world," said Bee Wilson in the Sunday Times: green campaigners are constantly telling us off for one thing or another. "It is therefore a testament to the power of Tristram Stuart's jaw-dropping study of food waste that so much of what he says comes as a genuine shock." His message is simple: he estimates that a quarter of all the food we buy is wasted, a total of 5.4m tonnes per year, or £8 per week in the average household. Every year in the UK, we throw away 1.6bn apples, 484bn unopened yoghurts and 2.6bn slices of bread. Even those who eat every crumb and compost their peelings are part of "a system that generates preposterous levels of waste". The company that makes M&S sandwiches, for instance, chucks away four slices from every loaf – the crusts and the first slice at either end – a total of 13,000 slices every day.

"Stuart will take you to farms where entire fields of spinach lie rotting because a few blades of grass have been found between the rows," said Paul Kingsnorth in the Independent. "He will show you vast piles of carrots rejected by Asda for not being perfectly straight." (Some 25-40 per cent of British fruit and vegetable crops is lost in this way.) The "worst culprits" are the supermarkets, said John Preston in the Sunday Telegraph. Sainsbury's discards 66,000 tonnes of food every year, thanks to a combination of absurdly cautious best before dates and overstocking (so that its shelves are always groaning with goods). Only 10 per cent of this goes to charity. The rest goes to landfill, because it is worried that some might be sold on, damaging the brand. Stuart himself is a "freegan", who lived for years off what the shops threw out – finding enough in their bins for "a banquet" every night. In the old days, all this waste would have at least ended up as swill. But since the foot and mouth crisis, swill has been banned, quite unnecessarily, and farmers must now buy expensive feed instead.

Waste is an "exceptional" book, said Linda Christmas in the Daily Telegraph – a powerful account of "a hideous problem". Stuart's message would have been even more powerful if he had resisted "the environmentalist's urge to nag", said Wilson. He thinks everyone should eat up their crusts, and I suspect he might like us "to breathe less, as well as eat less". Even so, he has "an unanswerable case", and we need to listen.

Waste, by Tristram Stuart, 448pp (Penguin, £9.99) The Week Bookshop £9.49 (incl p&p) ·