Tristram Stuart

I really fucking hate how Goodreads does not save my reviews if I spend too long writing them.

Shorter review: more substance! fewer unimaginable examples! (Quick, kids - draw me 275 tonnes of imperfect tomatoes rotting in the field!)
More guidance for the normal consumer! Less pretense that being a "fregan" is changing anything or is a viable choice for much of the world!
More focus on the human end of food waste (starvation)! Less focus on "gee, aren't corporations just awful"!

Also, the show more notes/bibliography/index took up almost 150 pages. For a book on waste, that seems ... excessive. show less

This is an amazingly important book that needs to be read by everyone in the 'developed' world, at the very least so that they learn that using green bags to bring the groceries home and digging a vegetable patch in is not doing enough to help the environment. As the author says 'By throwing away food you are paying for: the wanton degradation of the environment, the starvation of people on the other side of the world, pollution in your local landfill site, unnecessary global warming, water show more depletion, soil erosion, habitat destruction and deforestation. Completely eliminating food waste in your home is achievable.'
The fact is that those of us on Earth today are just going to have to make some major changes now or they will be forced upon us in the near future. And this book outlines one of the major changes that needs to be made, and how it can be done. Please, get your hands on a copy of this book, read it, and absorb what it has to say. show less

This book doesn't tell you what to eat or what not to eat. It simply says eat what you purchase. The amount of waste that is produced from production to consumer is immense. Ironically, due to the fact that none of the numbers are scientifically followed, it's difficult to know how large the problem is. The statistics and laws are heavily sourced from Europe, but nonetheless apply to nearly every culture. Take a first small step by being aware of your meal planning, food shopping and eating.

I can handle dry, that's not the problem. It's assuming I have a detailed knowledge of the politics and culture of 17th century England. It's 75 endnotes per chapter with 67 of them being nothing but citations and the remaining having good information I actually want to read so I have to decide whether to turn to the back 4 times a page to make sure I get everything or risk missing something helpful to try to stay in the flow of reading. After complaining a few times about the book Shawn saw show more me reading it again and asked why I was still bothering. I had just read the sentence: "It was with the help of Indian culture that Tryon freed himself from Christianities anthropocentric value system and made a leap into another moral dimension." I returned the book to the library. show less