Eating from supermarket waste bins – disgusting!

What a freegan eats. Image credit: Tristram Stuart

I was musing on food waste. Well actually I was musing on Al Capone, and that led me to food waste. And now to Tristram Stuart, who's a fregan, he takes food out of waste bins. The giant bins that lurk in the loading bays behind supermarkets. Some people find this disgusting. But, he says, the really disgusting thing is that good food is put there in the first place. He's written a book Waste, and in July 2009 he talked to Andrew Marr about it on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week.

If you're in the UK, it's here on BBC iPlayer. You’ll find Tristram 21 minutes into the programme. If that doesn’t work for you, here’s a clip I've made. The whole clip is 20 minutes, of which the first half is Tristram, and the rest is David Haslam on his book Fat, Gluttony and Sloth.

Or you can see Tristram on this Youtube clip, interviewed by David Frost on Al-Jazeera's Frost over the World, 2 Oct 2009 (9.30 minutes into the programme).



A couple more links may be of interest. Jonathan Bloom is an American who writes about food waste. This is his blog. He is the author of American Wasteland - how America throws away nearly half of its food, and what we can do about it.

He welcomes the new UK regulations, see next post on Al Capone (though my understanding is that they are not regulations, just unenforceable guidance.)

Finally here's Wikipedia on food waste