Food Waste and Sustainable Eating in Historical Perspective

摘要

Today, food waste garners increasing attention in the headlines as calls for direct action on climate change intensify. A third of all the food we produce globally goes to waste, and if all this needlessly discarded produce were a country it would bethe third greatest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the world.Footnote Scholars in the social sciences are beginning to explore in print the complex political, socio-economic, religious, and cultural reasons why food is wasted – be it lost inagricultural production, spoiled in transit, discarded at the retail stage, or wasted at home.Footnote Yet, very little has been written on this topic from a historical perspective.Footnote We still know surprisingly little about the ways in which historical actors thought about food waste, and how they reused, recycled, and disposed of it.