With shortages, volatile prices and nearly one billion people hungry, the world has a food problem - or thinks it does. Farmers, manufacturers, supermarkets and consumers in North America and Europe discard up to half of their food - enough to feed all the world's hungry three times over. Meanwhile, in the developing world crops rot because farmers lack the means to process, store and transport them to market. Forests are destroyed and global warming accelerated growing food that will never be eaten. But there are surprisingly painless remedies to what has become one of the world's most pressing environmental and social problems. Introducing us to a motley cast of foraging pigs, potato farmers, freegans and food industry directors, and travelling from Yorkshire to China, from Pakistan to Japan, Stuart encounters grotesque examples of profligacy, but also inspiring ways of making the most of what we have. Combining front-line investigation with the analytical skills demonstrated in his acclaimed history, "The Bloodless Revolution", Stuart's new work is essential reading for anyone keen to understand how our waste has created a global food crisis - and how we can fix it.

Author Biography

Tristram Stuart has been a freelance writer for Indian newspapers, a project manager in Kosovo and a prominent critic of the food industry. He has made regular contributions to television documentaries, radio and newspaper debates on the social and environmental aspects of food. His first book, the 'magnificently detailed and wide-ranging' (New Yorker) The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India, was published in 2007. He lives in the UK.