Tristram Stuart

“Good food for free has been the holy grail of foragers since our ancestors first climbed down from the trees.”

“Who cares if a carrot has a slight bend? They're all the same when they end up on the plate.”

“The manufacture and running of all the world's computers, the toxicity of the hardware mountains that we currently dump on other countries; all this can be totted up on the environmental account of web-users and its authors.”

“As human pastoralists discovered 8,000 years ago, raising animals can be an efficient way of harnessing otherwise unusable resources such as grass.”

“Often, farmers have difficulty finding secondary markets for their outgrades and have no choice but to leave fresh produce unharvested to rot in the field. Gleaning Network U.K. coordinates teams of volunteers with willing farmers across the U.K. to direct this fresh surplus produce to charities that redistribute it to people that need it most.”

“A hunk of beef raised on Scottish moorland has a very different ecological footprint from one created in an intensive feedlot using concentrated cereal feed, and a wild venison or rabbit casserole is arguably greener than a vegetable curry.”

“In Kenya, where there isn't the luxury of feeding grains to animals, livestock yield more calories than they consume because they are fattened on grass and agricultural by-products inedible to humans.”

“It's certainly sobering to think that British consumers waste roughly a quarter of the food we buy. Or to put it another way, we funnel £12 billion a year from the supermarket through to our rubbish tips, costing each household an average of £480.”

“I simply believe food is too good to throw away - and Christmas leftovers can be a gastronomic opportunity for the well-skilled kitchen forager. With a little imagination, there are a million ways to use up leftovers rather than bin them.”

“Once food gets into our fridges, larders and kitchens, ensuring that it gets used up before going off seems like an obvious thing to do - but it's alarming how many millions of tonnes are simply chucked because we don't keep track of the food we've spent our money on.”

“According to the 'food waste pyramid,' ensuring that food is eaten by people is the top priority. Failing that, the next best thing is to feed it to farm animals.”

“In Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, the government in a matter of years has put a lot of energy behind recycling food waste as livestock feed. It's environmentally friendly, it provides cheap livestock feed for the farmers in those parts of the world, and it avoids sending the food waste to landfill.”

“Food redistribution is economically sensible, ecologically pressing, and socially responsible; it is high time food corporations woke up to it and governments started funding the organisations that facilitate it.”

“A country like America has twice as much food on its shop shelves and in its restaurants than is actually required to feed the American people.”

“Viewed from a holistic ecological perspective, some meat - such as conscientiously hunted animals - involves less suffering and environmental damage than arable agriculture, while both of these are significantly less harmful than indiscriminately purchasing meat on the market.”

“Supermarkets didn't even want to talk to me about how much food they were wasting. I'd been round the back. I'd seen bins full of food being locked and then trucked off to landfill sites, and I thought, surely there is something more sensible to do with food than waste it.”

“Vegetarians have been around for a very long time - Pythagoreans forbade eating animals more than 2,500 years ago - but even as the environmental evidence mounted, they didn't appear to be winning the argument.”

“Food redistribution is one of the best win-win solutions for food waste avoidance. Food companies can often save money by donating food rather than paying the £80 or so per tonne in landfill tax and disposal costs.”

“Liver, lungs, heads, tails, kidneys, testicles, all of these things which are traditional, delicious and nutritious parts of our gastronomy go to waste.”

“We domesticated pigs to turn food waste back into food. And yet, in Europe, that practice has become illegal since 2001 as a result of the foot-and-mouth outbreak. It's unscientific. It's unnecessary. If you cook food for pigs, just as if you cook food for humans, it is rendered safe. It's also a massive saving of resources.”