Tristram Stuart's "Waste"

My first full time job was at a natural foods store in Virginia, where I was in charge of the refrigerated section. I regularly banged heads with the manager, who insisted that I order more product in order to keep the shelf looking full, while I was inclined to order less so there would be less waste.

I thought of that as I read through Tristram Stuart's new book, "Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal," which includes detailed and sobering statistics about global food waste, which runs to more than half of all the food produced in the world. I'd heard this statistic before--there was a UN report earlier this year--but it was illuminating to get such extensive detail about how and why this waste occurs, and its moral, environmental, and financial repercussions .

Now that I own my own food business, I am slightly more sympathetic to the position of my long ago manager, who insisted that I keep the shelves fully stocked despite the resulting waste. You really do lose more money by not having enough product on hand to meet demand than you do by wasting some of what you have available. It makes me crazy to run out of food at a market and know I could have sold more. My own solution has been to develop a business where most of the extra food can be used at other events (although there is still more waste than I would like) and also to base my menu largely on perfectly good ingredients that other businesses might have wasted, like the vegetables that I buy at the end of the day at the farmers' market.

Stuart argues repeatedly that one of the reasons grocery stores waste so much is because their systems for tracking inventory are inadequate or they simply don't give the endeavor enough effort. While that may occur some of the time, in my experience a far more daunting problem is the fact that customer demand is consistently inconsistent. It can correlate with the weather, the time of year, time of day, time of the week, and time of the month, but after a point it just is what it is, and I don't think there will ever be a way to accurately predict it, especially with the prevailing expectation of unlimited consumer choice.