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ECO HERO: TRISTRAM STUART

Greta Jonyniate | 17.11.11

Tristram Stuart, organiser of Feeding the 5000 event, award-winning campaigner and author Facts and figures on Waste – the issue in UK and globally, top tips to avoid waste and solutions.

1. What inspires you?

The Uighur people in western China: they live in a land of scarce resources and waste practically nothing.

2. What makes you angry?

Chopping down the Amazon rainforest to grow crops to feed livestock to create more food which is then wasted.

3. If you were Prime Minister, what would be the first thing you'd change?

I would seek an international agreement on halting the destruction of virgin forests.

4. Can individuals really make a difference?

Yes! When I was ten I wrote to McDonald's complaining about the CFCs in their packaging. A month later I got a letter back saying they were changing their policy. Obviously a total coincidence but it gave me the delusion that individuals can create change and I still suffer from that.

5. What is your personal mission?

Between now and tomorrow at 2pm, feeding 5000 people in Trafalgar Square on food that would otherwise have been wasted.

6. What's more urgent: changing things from the inside or starting a revolution on the outside?

I believe that you can do both. Tomorrow at Feeding the 5000 an arrary of people and organisations of every political stripe, from revolutionary environmentalists to businesses interested in improving efficiency will be united on one issue: that food waste is an injustice and must be tackled.

7. What is the best meal you've had in your life? Cooked by whom? Eaten with whom?

 In 2009, when we last put on this event I got a text at 8.30 in the morning just as I was walking into a live broadcast with the Today programme. It was from my brothers who had gone to collect the curry for Feeding the 5000, telling me how delicious it was. They were right. It was a wonderful hot meal cooked by volunteers, made entirely from food that normally would have gone to waste, and eaten by five thousand members of the public. Tomorrow lunchtime we are doing the same thing again.

8. Can you describe a typical work day? (ie. what you do within that day and who you have potential to influence etc).

Typical doesn't exist. At the beginning of this week I was picking cabbages, the week before I was discussing food waste policy at Number 10, next week I am in Barcelona for a conference as part of the European Week of Waste Reduction which Feeding the 5000 is launching here in the UK tomorrow.

9. How do you define success?

In 2009, when I watched hungry people walk into the food tent in Trafalgar Square, and come out with a big smile on their face, that was the most satisfying thing ever.

10. What's the best advice anyone's ever given you?

The Uighur man who pointed at three grains of rice at the bottom of my bowl and asked 'Clean?' showed me that our society should be capable, as Uighur society is, of regarding food waste as unacceptable.

11. What's your favourite book or film of late?

David Attenborough's film on insects in the BBC series Trials of Life. His film demonstrated the sustainable hunting practices of ant colonies: which divide up their territory so as not to deplete their resource base. Humans still haven't worked out how to do that.

12. What would you most like to happen to protect the planet?

 A global land management agreement so that we stop depleting resources unnecessarily. The first thing we should do is to stop trashing the land to grow food that no-one eats.

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