Home  Features Food & Recipes Conservation is key
|
Written by Sonia Morgan
|
|
Sunday, 04 May 2008 |
Consider this: “Researchers say that about a quarter of the food produced in America is thrown away. That's enough to feed about 49 million people.” – Sun-Sentinel
Consider this: “850 million people around the world are not getting enough to eat, and they're mad about it. There have been violent food uprisings recently in Egypt, Haiti, Senegal, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Yemen, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia - even Italy.” – The Baltimore Sun
What it means is that America produces enough food that we have a surplus… not to mention the food we import. People are worried about the world food crisis and rightly so. But in a country where food fights are glorified in the movies, and people buy in huge bulks, often times tossing out much of that food, it becomes apparent that maybe we were buying into the idea of excess. Essentially, around the globe we are seeing less food fights and more fights over food.
Be honest. How many times have you gone into the fridge and have to throw out foods (especially veggies) that have gone bad, without you even opening the packages??? Exactly. And how many times have we cooked too much, put the leftovers in the fridge and eventually have to toss them out?
It is no wonder that with the news that there is a shortage of rice, people have been panic buying and cleaning off the shelves in wholesale stores like Costco and Sam’s, so much so that they have to ration that item. We have become so used to having more than enough all the time, that at the least inkling that we might not have excess, we panic.
But if you really check it out, you’d see that we don’t consume as much as we buy and we really don’t need to consume as much as we do. Consider the obesity problem that we have in this country and how it affects everything from the amount of fuel we use in our cars and airplanes, to health issues like hypertension, diabetes and other illnesses caused from or aided by obesity.
Maybe this is a chance to seriously look at our food consumption, our portion sizes and perhaps even our mode of transportation. Sometimes we can walk to a nearby store, instead of driving there. If we have bicycles, we can ride them, instead of driving. We save on gas and get a workout in both cases.
Cooking at home will save us money and gas, than if we were to eat out. We would also be able to control what we use in our dishes and how we prepare them.
Last time we talked about brown bagging it for lunch. But there is also the need to buy less, simply because we end up discarding much of what we buy because we don’t use them fast enough before they go bad.
So how can we learn from this food and fuel crisis? We can learn to conserve what we have, buy what we need and stay away from excesses. There is enough food in the world to feed everyone, it’s the uneven distribution of supplies that have left some people starving while others and throwing away food.
|
|
|
|
