Circular Podcast with Tristram Stuart

On the fifth episode of Series 01 Katie Treggiden spoke to author of Waste: Uncovering a Global Food Scandal, Tristram Stuart. He and Katie Treggiden explore how his early freeganism got him punched in the face, and how he fed 5,000 people on 13 tonnes of unwanted ‘ugly’ fruit and veg on a snowy day in Trafalgar Square.

Below is a transcript of our conversation. Find the full episode available to listen on Spotify here.

Katie Treggiden 

I’m Katie Treggiden and this is Circular, a podcast exploring the intersection of craft design and sustainability. Join me as I talk to the thinkers, doers and makers of the circular economy. These are the people who are challenging the linear take make waste model of production and consumption, and working towards something better. In this series, we’re talking about waste.

Tristram Stuart 

When I made the case for what I later came to call freeganism, or eating food that would otherwise be wasted as an ecologically cogent argument, as well as a critique of the surplus and the waste and really the mindlessness of the food being produced, but the result was I got punched in the face.

Katie Treggiden 

Tristram Stuart is an award winning author, speaker, campaigner, and expert on the environmental and social impacts of food, and specifically food waste. His book Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, published by Penguin, is one of the most well thumbed tomes in my collection, and perhaps more importantly, was described by The Times as a genuinely revolutionary contribution to the history of human ideas. His TED Talk, the Global Food Waste Scandal, has been watched over a million times. Although to be fair, at least 900,000 of those could have been me in the research for my book. The environmental campaigning organisation he founded, Feedback, works across dozens of countries worldwide to change society’s attitude towards wasting food. And he’s the founder of Toast Ale, a beer launched in the UK in 2006, that is made using fresh surplus bread.

Katie Treggiden 

Tristram, I’d like to start by saying thank you, I’ve become somewhat of a superfan through the course of researching my own book. So thank you for your books, your TED Talks, and of course for talking to me today. Let’s start at the beginning. Tell me about the role that food played in your childhood.

Tristram Stuart 

Well, I had the immense good fortune of growing up in the countryside, where my father grew almost all of the vegetables year round that we ate. And from the forest, I would get wild squirrels and rabbits, and when I was of age, deer also, and foraged mushrooms and other foraged foods. So I was always very connected to the land through the food that we were eating.

Katie Treggiden 

And that gives me a little bit of insight, I think into my next question. You say in your TED Talk that the start of your journey to uncovering the global food waste scandal was buying some pigs when you were 15 and feeding them food scraps. And as I was listening to that TED Talk, I thought ‘Hang on a minute. I was mostly revising for my GCSEs when I was 15 and my friends were either doing the same or sneaking off to the park to drink cider.’ So I’m fascinated by what led you to buying pigs aged 15?

Tristram Stuart 

I had grown up hearing stories of my father’s childhood on a pre war farm just across the valley from where I live now and where I was growing up. And in those days, mixed farming produced everything that one needed to consume. Vegetable gardens were fed with the manure from animals. And I wanted to recreate some of that self sufficient, rural, communal idyll that I’d, I’d heard of. Indeed, at the age of 13 I wanted to set up a rural commune here in my small pre war farm in Sussex, and I set about doing whatever I could at that age and yes, I was revising hard for my GCSEs. I was a student with  academic dedication and my school friends called me Farmer Stewart and mockingly showing their appreciation for the pork and the eggs and the vegetables I used to bring into school and sell to their parents. And yeah, I saved up 90 pounds and I bought my first sow and started breeding from her using a boar from a farmer that I used to work for during the summer holidays. And I was given by my father for my 15th birthday present some purebred like Sussex chickens and started breeding them. And I got myself a ferret and also bred them and used the ferret for catching rabbits. And that was really what I did. I used to say, when my teachers, it was technically not permitted to have a job outside of school hours, and I did get a lot of questions about it. I only once failed to do my homework and that was when my sow had a litter of pigs that evening and obviously I was somewhat preoccupied. But I used to just say, ‘Well, I don’t watch television, and most of my school friends do. And so I look after my animals instead of doing that, not instead of doing my work,’ It was a really very, very special time. I lived just with my dad. And he grew the vegetables, I did the meat and the eggs and I swapped his vegetable offcuts from his garden for the manure that I produced from my animals. And it was a really, really very special and wonderful time.

Katie Treggiden  

It sounds amazing and incredibly educational in its own right, I would imagine.

Tristram Stuart 

Yes.

Katie Treggiden 

So having acquired your pigs, tell me how that led you to this journey of understanding and exposing food waste?

Tristram Stuart  

Well, I quickly realised that buying pig food from the store was going to cost me more money, than I was going to make by selling pork. I was also aware, even at that time, that animal feed was one of the reasons why the Amazon rainforest was being chopped down and I didn’t want to have anything to do with the import of soy products from Latin America, because of that connection. And I also knew that the traditional and most ecologically friendly way of feeding pigs and chickens was to feed them on food waste. That indeed is what humans domesticated pigs for, several 1000 years ago, to upcycle the byproducts of our food system back into food. And so I started knocking on doors. My own school kitchen provided me with two or three huge yellow buckets of waste food every single day, which my pigs squealed with delight whenever they saw me arriving back from school, carrying these enormous buckets. And I would tip it out and see all the things that my school friends had turned up their noses at. Not the plate scrapings, but the just unserved, entire dishes of perfectly good food, all of which was going to waste. In those days, this was still perfectly legal. I wasn’t feeding them any of the meat products, it was all the vegetarian stuff. And this was both amazing good food for the pigs, as well as obviously avoiding the landfill that this food waste would otherwise be going into. I went to the local baker and I started collecting six or seven sacks of organic bread every week. I went to the local town market where I collected 20 or so boxes of cauliflower leaves and other vegetable trimmings. And I started going to the supermarkets. And that was the most interesting, because they started by denying that they wasted any food. They said they sold it all. I then started going around the back of those supermarkets and seeing that that was a lie. I saw huge bins full of perfectly good food that were going to waste. I saw them locking those bins and sending it off to landfill. And that’s when I became really angry with the food system. I was also collecting ugly potatoes, which I used to barter with a farmer for eggs. And these ugly potatoes were again supermarket waste, they were being turned down because they were the wrong shape or size for the supermarket’s really strict cosmetic standards. They were perfectly good potatoes, we ate them at my home. And that again made me think a lot of this waste is completely avoidable. It’s causing this environmental destruction. And okay, I’m upcycling it into pork. But I’m not even scratching the surface of the waste in my local area, let alone presumably this is happening around the world. And that’s when I started to think about the system and how it was producing waste, why it was producing waste and most importantly, what needed to happen to change that.

Katie Treggiden 

Talk me through the journey between your discoveries as a 15 year old pig owner and sitting down to write your first book?

Tristram Stuart 

I left home and went to university and immediately had an issue with the industrial food that was being served at university and became a vegan. Because I saw the meat and the dairy products, especially the dairy products in the vegetarian options that kind of inch thick gloopy cheese that was on every single vegetarian option as part of a system that I really didn’t want to feed myself from. I saw it as part of the toxic, environmentally destructive industrial agricultural system. And that industrial system, I knew then, and it remains the case, is the single biggest negative impact that humans have on Planet Earth. It’s the main cause of deforestation. By far the biggest user of freshwater. It’s the single biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions. Most of the soil erosion and species extinction that happens in the world can be attributed to food production. And I knew that we could do food – humans can do food – in a way that looks after the planet as well as producing healthy and sustainable diets for everyone. And I just didn’t want to have anything to do with the industrial system. So I stopped eating any of the food ultimately. I got kicked out actually, of the college eating dining halls, because the one food that I did start eating was the leftovers from my college mate’s plates. And this made total sense to me. You know, if I was eating leftovers, I wasn’t contributing to demand. I was just using stuff that was otherwise going to be thrown away. But I got called in to see the Bursar. She said, ‘Look, you’re not paying the fee for eating in the dining halls, because you’re vegan and we don’t produce vegan food, and yet you’re eating the food that’s been leftover.’ And I made the case for what I later came to call freeganism, or eating food that would otherwise be wasted, as an ecologically cogent argument, as well as a critique of the surplus and the waste. And really the mindlessness of the food being produced. But the result was I got punched in the face by one of the servers in the kitchen and banned from coming….punched in the face actually simply for not wanting to eat the food. It was a kind of friendly punch. But it was a punch nonetheless, yeah. And the Bursar banned me from the kitchen, from the catering halls, because I wasn’t contributing to the cost of it. So that was my first run-in with the authorities on the issue of freeganism. I started getting most of my food from the supermarket bins of the University town where I was, at University of Cambridge. And that began my journey on what became a global campaign against food waste. When I started seeing just how much perfectly good food was being thrown away by the supermarket’s. I got angry.

Katie Treggiden 

Yeah. And you’ve touched there on some of the reasons that industrial scale food production is damaging to the environment. How specifically is waste food feeding into that problem?

Tristram Stuart 

Well, a third of all the world’s food at least, is currently being wasted. So if you imagine all of that environmental impact, all of that deforestation, all of the pesticides, and other chemicals and other resources and fossil fuels that we use, as well as the labour and the love that goes into food production, the third of all of that is completely needless. It’s producing food that would, you know, is just being wasted. And cutting food waste is one of the ways of reducing that total demand for agricultural products, which in turn, we hope, will have the knock on effect of cutting demand for land and other resources that go into growing that food, thus reducing the enormous environmental burden of food production on Planet Earth. But there is an ancillary, indeed for me, an even more important way in which campaigning on food waste goes to the heart of the current food system paradigm. I call it the productionist’s paradigm:  the idea that what the world needs is to double food production, or increase it by 50%, depending on who you’re listening to, in order to stave off the inevitable famine people worry about when they were 9 or 10 billion people on Planet Earth by mid century. My argument is, that paradigm, that strategy, is not the way to avoid a food crisis on a global scale. Indeed, it is the single biggest threat to long term global food security. The food system is already a massive and unsustainable burden on the environment. The idea that we can double it, without doubling that problem, at present is a farce. Indeed, this strategy seems to me to be designed to maximise profits for the world’s big food corporations, so it’s no surprise that Cargill and Monsanto are two of the companies that have been pushing this agenda most aggressively. We need, they say, we need to double food production, we must have a massive boost in food production. And my point is, well, if we need more food, there are ways of doing it that can be done in accordance with what the planet needs as well. Massively reducing food waste is one of those ways that will liberate food supplies. And the other is of course, consuming less in countries where we already consume more than is good for our own health. Particularly less meat and dairy products that have the disproportionately huge impact on the environment, and indeed on our own health. Reducing food waste and the consumption of high impact foods like meat and dairy products, is a much more powerful strategy for reducing our environmental impact as well as increasing food supplies globally, where it’s needed.

Katie Treggiden 

So in your research for your book, you uncovered the fact that in the US, just to give one example, they are producing twice as much food as their population needs for their nutritional requirements. And if you count livestock feed, and you’ve touched on some of the problems with meat and dairy, that figure rises to four times. How have we got into this situation when we’re producing so much more food than we need?

Tristram Stuart 

Well, let’s start by taking a big step back, and acknowledge that the production of food surplus is humanity’s biggest success story. The ability to manipulate our environment to produce enough food, to avoid seasonal scarcity, to avoid famine, to store food through the year, to have enough to feast on occasionally, to have surplus that we can trade with our neighbours, to have enough to mean that not everyone has to be involved in food production, so we can have artisans, governments, armies, priests. All these people that are totally useless from the point of view of producing calories, are what civilization is built on. We would have no towns and cities, if we didn’t first have agriculture, farmers able to feed those non food producing sectors of the population. And as we now know, it’s a tiny minority of the human population in rich countries that are involved in food production, and they feed everyone else. It’s an absolute miracle of human transformation of the environment. And, if we lived in an infinite planet, with infinite resources, infinite land, and infinite space for all the other species that share this planet with us, then surplus and indeed waste would not necessarily be a problem. However, this is not so. We live on a little island, green and blue dot in arid universe, and our exploitation of the natural system of this little island has now, as we all know, reached a tipping point; a threshold where our impact is unsustainable. In other words, if we carry on, we will completely eradicate the vast majority of species on this planet, we may undermine the viability of the life system of this earth in ways that will bite us back in a very uncontrollable way. With global crop failures, and droughts, and floods, and all sorts of other things that may well happen, that will massively interrupt our food system and cause the suffering, particularly in parts of the world, like Asia and Africa, where the surplus and the buffer between them and hunger – starvation – is much more fragile than our own hugely abundant supermarket-led system. So that’s the step back, you know, the production of surplus has always been about creating a buffer between us and hunger, and having all of the luxuries that civilization can provide. We now have a buffer so gigantic, that it would be healthy for us to review just how much of that we should be clinging hold of. A lot of analysts agree that a population does ideally want a surplus of around 130% of its absolute nutritional requirements, and that allows for any interruptions in supply and bad seasons and the rest of it. But as you say, we now have between 2 and, depending on how you do the figures, 400% of our nutritional requirements available to us in rich countries. And this not only is the root cause of the environmental destruction wreaked by our food system, it is also the root cause of the single biggest public health disaster of all public health disasters in the planet. And that is the disaster of overconsumption for 2 billion people in rich countries and, increasingly, the middle classes of developing countries, who eat too much and this negatively affects their health with obesity and diabetes being the most commonly known impacts of overconsumption. But the plethora, the many headed Hydra of overconsumption, the way it manifests in all sorts of things, tooth decay in children and what not, it’s an absolute catastrophe from the point of view of human health, and of course, the cost that goes with that.

Katie Treggiden  

And yet there are still people in developing nations and developed countries alike who haven’t got enough to eat.

Tristram Stuart 

Right. And one thing I should make clear is that my argument against the corporation led, profit driven, let’s double food production by 2050 paradigm, I should make it clear that there are some parts of the world where increasing food production is an appropriate measure to take. Sub Saharan Africa is a case in point there were parts of the agricultural system there, that could be made much more efficient, much more efficient in terms of the use of resources, much more productive. And in particular, getting food that is already being produced to market where it’s needed before it spoils, is one of the main areas of work in terms of reducing food waste; increasing productivity, increasing on farm incomes, and increasing nutritional availability in parts of the world where it’s really actually needed. That is absolutely part of the package of what we need to do. It’s very different from saying what we need is a global drive to double food production. One of the things I’d say about people who are in food poverty in rich countries, is that very often the redistribution of surplus food, the giving of unsold food products to charity by supermarkets and manufacturers, and indeed now also farmers, is it’s a very good thing to be doing. And indeed, much of my campaigning for the last 20 years, has focused on really hammering the supermarkets and their supply chains, that they were you know, wasting all of that food and not even bothering donating it to local charities who were feeding those people who are most vulnerable in our society, and lacked the resources to afford a decent diet. And I really need to clarify that, that is a good thing to do, but at no point can we say that that will by itself solve food waste, neither will it solve food poverty, let alone poverty itself. These things are structural economic inequalities and that is the way to approach the issue of poverty in our country, and in other rich countries. Not just a sticky plaster approach of giving surplus food to the poor.

Katie Treggiden 

Absolutely. But as you say, they’re good solutions in the meantime.

Katie Treggiden 

After the break, I’ll be talking to Tristram about how he worked with a Hari Krishna devotee to feed 5,000 people in Trafalgar Square with ugly fruit and veg on a snowy day in mid December.

Katie Treggiden 

I might have mentioned I’ve got a new book coming out. Wasted: When Trash Becomes Treasure, published by Ludion, is available to pre order on Amazon now and in local bookshops from 8th October.

Katie Treggiden 

Tell us about your feeding the 5,000 events and how those are helping to redistribute food but also I guess, raising awareness of some of these issues.

Tristram Stuart 

Oh yeah, feeding the 5,000 is absolutely about telling the story. It’s not itself proposing that having enormous lunches where we feed 5,000 people, for free, with food that would otherwise be wasted in cities around the world, that’s not the solution to the problem. It’s more like manifesting the scale of the problem, raising awareness, and pointing to the structural problems that are giving rise to the problem of food waste in the first place, as well as highlighting in an inspirational and celebratory way, the solutions that already exist on the ground to solving this problem. You know, when I first published my book in 2009, Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, I’d written 350 pages of very readable, but densely argued and data rich text, and I knew that for sure lots of people were going to read it – it was getting huge coverage, newspapers, both in this country and around the world – but to reach a really mass audience, I knew I had to do something more visceral, more celebratory and, in food, the best way of communicating your messages is with the food itself. So I organised the first step of feeding the 5,000 in Trafalgar Square. Five weeks before the event, the mayor’s office finally turned their, ‘No, you cannot do that in Trafalgar Square,’ into, ‘Yes, okay, you can,’ which gave me quite a short window to organise everything. Find the food, that was actually the very easy part. Of the farmers I’d been talking to during research of my book, were very willing to give me all of their ugly fruits and vegetables that they were having to waste because they were really angry about the supermarket system that was giving rise to this waste, and the economic loss associated with it. So we needed only 750 kilos to feed the 5,000, but was donated 13 tonnes of fresh surplus food by farmers and packers across the country. All of the rest of that went through organisations like Fairshare to feed hungry people across London. We gave away a lot of ugly fruits and vegetables at that first feeding the 5,000, as well as the cooked curry. And I only about 12 days before the event found the amazing chef Para who has been feeding the homeless on the streets of London every day for the last 30 years. He’s a Hari Krishna devotee, but he believes that we need to look after each other and look after Planet Earth just like I do. And he said yeah, I’ll cook you 5,000 curries. I have the biggest pots in Europe, he can cook 5,000 meals in a single pot. And then the morning of the event happened and I was on the Today programme, and BBC Breakfast, and Thomasina Miers was there, and there were loads of media and I was doing interviews about this enormous feast we were doing, getting across the campaigning message that the supermarkets were throwing away their food rather than donating it to charities, they were making farmers waste perfectly good produce. There were people in the developing world who were going without, while we were wasting so much. We had a dozen organisations represented at the event. The hype was just going absolutely perfectly, but I still had absolutely no idea if anyone was going to come to this food waste feast. It was snowing on that day, mid December 2009. And it wasn’t until half past 12 that I had a break, looked over the balcony in Trafalgar Square, and I saw this huge queue go all the way around the square. And people were going into the curry tent and coming out and saying, ‘Wow, that’s delicious. Why would anyone have wasted that?’ And it became like a festival. People were just absorbing it. Every voxpop that we heard was bang on message. And then the aftermath was total saturation in the media. We were in TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, and we’d struck a match. Public opinion was behind us. And the result of that event was beyond what I could have imagined. We saw immediate responses from the supermarket. They started stocking ugly fruit and vegetables in a way they hadn’t done before. One of the supermarkets, I will leave them unnamed, called up one of the pack houses that had supplied us with fruit and vegetables and said, ‘We understand that you provided food for this event. If that is the case, we’re going to withdraw our custom from you. This is causing us a lot of grief. And to their credit, that representative who would come to the event – he was on the train back from the event when he received this call – said, ‘what’s your problem? You on your own website say you support Fairshare and Fairshare was one of the main partners in this event. They’re trying to promote the donating of surplus food to charity amongst all these other things.’ Stood his ground, and instead that supermarket changed its policies. Then DEFRA minister Hilary Benn wrote to the CEOs of all the supermarkets asking them to donate food rather than to destroy it. Public awareness went through the roof. Just before that event, the Sustainable Restaurants Association did a survey that ranked restaurant goers – what they wanted in terms of issues from the businesses that they were buying their food from – and food waste, out of all of these issues came 13 out of 13 issues. It was very low on people’s priorities. After the second feeding the 5,000 in London, that survey was done again and food waste came joint first, alongside healthy food. And that was coupled with an observable reduction in food waste in people’s homes, which of course was a combination of many, many different organisations who are now getting involved in food waste, including of course, the waste and resources action programme funded by the government and doing their Love Food Hate Waste campaign. But we had really inspired a different level of engagement, something really celebratory. Chefs had started including food waste in their television shows. And, you know, I did a Great British Waste Menu that was watched by more than 5 million people on BBC One primetime television where a bunch of chefs like Angela Hartnett had competed with each other, to produce a menu from food that would otherwise be wasted with a campaigning kind of tone to it. And then, of course, much later, I helped Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall doing his war on waste. That kind of way of getting across the message, hard hitting, but fun, celebratory, became really the flavour of the food campaigning that I have carried forward in all of the work that I’ve done.

Katie Treggiden 

And how have perceptions changed? So that first event was in 2009, that’s 11 years ago. And you’ve been campaigning and giving TED talks and writing books and kind of working really hard in this area. How have you seen people’s opinions on waste food change over that period of time?

Tristram Stuart 

There’s been a global and dramatic change. When I started campaigning, food waste was a non issue. Supermarkets were sweeping under the carpet. Public awareness was more or less zero. Media coverage of this story was, I mean, I’m not kidding you before 2002, when I started launching my public kind of campaign against the food waste of supermarkets and the rest of it, just with no stories on this subject at all. Big corporations had nothing say about it, government had no budget attributed to it, no policies to tackle it. Now, you cannot be a big food corporation without having something to say about food waste, having a strategy to tackle it. I am a UN champion of the Sustainable Development Goal 12.3, which is the goal to half food waste by 2030 that all nations in the world have signed up to. And I sit down alongside the CEO of Tesco, the CEO of Unilever, the CEO of the World Bank, and all of these huge and very important big organisations in the world. And we sit down and we talk about food waste and what we need to do to tackle it globally. We’ve seen increasingly ambitious laws being passed by nation state governments, both here in the United Kingdom with the groceries code adjudicator act, in France, the famous law, encouraging supermarkets to donate rather than destroy their food, and in the USA, now, individual states are passing fantastically well aimed laws to reduce food waste. And then on the public side, awareness is transformed. It’s something that everyone more or less, is now much more aware of than they were previously. And the proof of the pudding is genuinely in the eating not in the wasting. The UK citizens have reduced, per capita, by just about one third, the amount of food that they throw away in their homes. And that, whilst leaving plenty of room for further improvement, is very hard to beat when you look for evidence of mass behaviour change in line with an environmental campaign. It really is a very significant reduction in the environmental impact of our food consumption habits. So, on the one hand, seeing what has now become a global movement, we took feeding the 5,000 to every inhabited continent, and won campaigns pretty much everywhere we went launching national movements with an alliance of organisations, we worked at a European level funded by the European Commission with a consortium of different organisations, to change behaviour, raise awareness, push corporations and governments to do better on food waste. It really is one of the most encouraging things when you see how quickly and how dramatically a discourse can be changed in that way in practice, along with it. I do want to end by saying that, whilst that is very encouraging, the big picture remains very bleak indeed. If we look at the environmental impact of the food production system globally, it’s continuing to accelerate in the wrong direction. Deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, the use of chemicals, the use of water, the species extinction that happens as a result of our destruction of the world’s remaining habitats principally to grow more food for us humans, is not diminishing, it’s still getting worse. I believe it is possible for us to turn the food system around and make it part of the regeneration and the undoing of our environmental damage – part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. But we haven’t even begun to turn the ship around. We haven’t slowed it down yet.

Katie Treggiden 

What are some very practical, pragmatic things that our listeners could do to contribute to that turning around?

Tristram Stuart 

We create the food system as consumers, as citizens. Every day, for the lucky ones amongst us three times a day, we make food choices. And every time we go to the shops, we vote with our pounds for the food system that we want and we want to see. That gives us enormous power to change that system by changing our buying habits. Now, for many, the idea of buying organic or Fairtrade with the increased price tag that goes with it, is not an option. But on the issue of food waste, cutting food waste by buying less and wasting less, by buying ugly fruits and vegetables, rather than the picture perfect ones, by buying discounted food from apps like Too Good To Go or even free food from Olio, stuff that would be, you know, otherwise thrown away, but it’s still perfectly fit for consumption. Those are ways of saving money. And therefore the environmental action is actually not price sensitive. It’s price positive for the consumer. I think this is one of the reasons why food waste has become such a cross cutting and global area of improvement, is that it is accessible to all. So buying less is the first step. And to be fair, I think that one of the ways of buying less is avoiding going to supermarkets too often. Supermarkets are built on the idea of projecting this image of cornucopia abundance – the infinite availability of every product, huge piled high shelves. I go into those institutions and you know, I’m as anti consumerist as they come, and I still find that I’ve gone into buy an apple that I come out with four other things. It’s a very deeply rooted instinct, when we see abundance to take some of it. We grew up for millions of years in an environment of scarcity and it made sense to take when we saw abundance laid before us. And nowadays, there are wonderful veggie box schemes and the rest of it, that can can really help to bring us good, sustainable, plant-based food deliveries that can avoid us then being tempted to buy too much of the unnecessary kind of junk food products that we might buy if we’re subjected to very successful marketing campaigns that encourage us to indulge in them.

Tristram Stuart 

Brilliant. So buy less, eat more of what we buy, and stay out of supermarkets. I think that’s a pretty good note to end on. So thank you so much, Tristram, I really appreciate your time and your insights today.

Katie Treggiden 

If you enjoyed this episode of Circular with Katie Treggiden, can I ask you to leave a review and perhaps even hit the subscribe button? Those two actions really help other people to find the podcast, so I would be very grateful. Thank you. Thank you to Tristram Stuart, Gordon Barker for the edit, October Communications for marketing support, Sound Compound for the music, and to you for joining me. You’ve been listening to Circular with Katie Treggiden.

…

P.S. I am recording Season Two of the podcast now and the theme this time is repair. I really believe that people who make and mend with their hands hold the keys to helping us move from a linear ‘take-make-waste’ model to a more sustainable ‘circular’ economy. If you do too, I am looking for likeminded brands to help bring the meaningful conversations I know I’m going to have on this season of the podcast to a larger audience. Email me and I’ll send you more info on how you could get involved as a brand partner.