Author illuminates food issues

WASTE: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal. By Tristram Stuart. Norton. $27.95.

Every time you throw out food that is moldy, smelly, overripe or otherwise inedible, you are directly contributing to world hunger. By purchasing excess food and then not consuming it, you are depriving needy, hungry people of the opportunity to eat.

That's one of the key concepts that Tristram Stewart drives home in his book, "Waste." Buoyed by John Locke's argument that if someone took more food than he needed and let it spoil, "He took more than his share, and robbed others," Stuart examines every step of the food process to see how it can be made less wasteful.

This is not your grandmother's guilt trip imploring you to clean your plate because there are starving children in India. This is a fact-finding mission to Pakistan, where Stuart interviews farmers who, for the lack of means to obtain a loan, cannot build or rent adequate grain storage to keep their harvest clean and dry, which would allow them to avoid having to sell it at harvest time and actually make a better profit.

He has little praise for major United Kingdom grocery chains, and less still for U.K., European Union and, to a lesser extent, U.S. governing bodies that set up roadblocks to food redistribution as well as to better collection and use of food waste: everything from lifting the U.K. ban on pig swill to banning sending food waste to a landfill.

What he uncovers seems incredible but is extensively documented: farmers whose crops are rejected because they don't meet a grocery's standards of being blemish-free and ideal in size and weight, factories where pastry trimmings are sent to the trash instead of formed into other pastries, packaging plants where four slices are discarded from each loaf of bread used to make prepackaged sandwiches because store managers think no customer will buy a sandwich made with the heel.

And it's not just how food is packaged, arranged, ordered and purchased, it's what's done with the food when it's no longer edible that's just as vital to stopping the cycle. Stuart is passionate, and his fervor for the cause may come across as fanatical at points, but you can't argue with his street cred. He is a self-described "freegan" who routinely scavenges perfectly good food tossed out by grocery stores and who raises pigs, chickens and bees.

And he doesn't want you to stop eating meat, though he would prefer that you eat more offal as well.

It may be radical, but Stuart argues that nothing less than an across-the-board re-examination and rethinking of food will accomplish the goal of feeding the hungry, reducing waste and, by extension, saving the planet.