Occasionally rambling but rewarding reading on a worldwide crisis.
A useful account of how we waste food.
British author Stuart (The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times, 2007) knows firsthand that in one day a supermarket in a major city can throw out enough food to feed 100 people. A practitioner of the anti-consumerist “freegan” lifestyle, he has salvaged discarded, unspoiled food from store dumpsters in many countries. Here he shows how developed nations treat food as a “disposable commodity” at every step of the journey from farm to dinner table. In the United States alone, “around 50 per cent of all food is wasted.” Farmers discard misshapen produce; fishermen throw back fish that are too small or the wrong species (killing most in the process). Supermarkets overstock to keep their shelves full and ensure they always have shoppers’ favorite products; others simply predict sales badly. Consumers overbuy out of a “primeval hoarding instinct” and discard about one quarter of their food purchases in the form of leftovers or unopened packages. If all the waste stopped, Stuart argues, it would free up food for the world’s hungry and reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions from agriculture that contribute to global warming. The global impact is such that the UN has called for a halving of food waste by 2025. Thus far, few governments and industries have acted. Drawing on interviews and travels in many countries, the author explores diverse aspects of the global food problem, including the effects of growing wasted food on the earth’s water, land and other resources, and the post-harvest losses of food in developing countries that occur for lack of processing and other technologies. Arguing that much waste is avoidable, Stuart outlines numerous steps than can be taken, from more mindful shopping by affluent consumers to redistribution of supermarket surpluses to the poor. He finds models for action in several Asian nations, including Japan, where the concept of mottaiai, which condemns waste, is reflected in a 2001 law requiring food businesses to recycle their food waste.
Occasionally rambling but rewarding reading on a worldwide crisis.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06836-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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