Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
It’s that very impressive thing, a novel of ideas that is also gripping and very funny too. It’s not new – Peacock wrote it to explore and satirise the contemporary debate, 20 years after Malthus first published – but it’s just as relevant today: it points out very clearly the inconsistencies of a fundamentally immoral situation.
There are a lot of complex problems in the world that require complex solutions but, in terms of the food scandal, you say there are huge opportunities there for the taking.
Again, if we look back at history, we can see this isn’t the first time we’ve faced these problems. Twenty years after Malthus first published, the satirist Thomas Love Peacock wrote a novel called Melincourt to explore the contemporary situation and point out its inconsistencies and fundamental immorality. Two characters take opposite sides: one, a Mr Fax, takes the Malthusian line – surplus, luxury and even waste are morally justifiable because they provide a buffer in hard times – while Mr Forester argues that the waste of food is the most pernicious form of luxury: it deprives others of the means of existence.
As the debate draws to a conclusion, Forester asks Fax what he thinks about those who don’t hold back from luxury in times of scarcity. He replies: ‘Truly I have nothing to say for them, but that they know not what they do.’
But the point is that today we do know. There isn’t much excuse for ignorance any more. If the billion of us who live in the wealthier countries wasted 25 per cent less, and I don’t mean feeding livestock, just what we throw away, that’d be enough to lift the one billion malnourished people in the world out of hunger.
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In his first book, campaigner, and historian Tristram Stuart looked into the rise of politically motivated vegetarianism in the 18th century. His second, Waste, is an urgent call to action. Nearly one billion people in the world go hungry every day while in North America and Europe, our farmers, manufacturers, supermarkets, and consumers discard between 30 and 50 per cent of our food supplies – enough to feed the world’s hungry more than three times over. As a result, freegans like Stuart are able to live on what is thrown away by our supermarkets. He’ll only stop taking food out of supermarket bins, he’s pledged, when they cease to throw good food away.
