Waste Not Want Not

by Mike

There has always been a line between those that have and those that have not. Modern society look at countries where poverty is at its worst and feel that we can ease the burden, ours and theirs, by donating to a telethon or charity and that will be enough until next year.

There’s always something cooking and nothing in the pot
They’re starving back in China, so finish what you got

Nobody Told Me By John Lennon

3.3 Million tonnes of food a year. That’s the shocking figure of how much is wasted in Britain every year. This roughly works out as means more than 15p of each £1 spent on food is wasted. A lot of this waste goes into landfill sites, where it breaks down and causes greenhouse gases.

There are no official figures on hand for Ireland but since we have a habit of closely following their habits in other categories it would be easy to speculate that our percentage would be something similar. While the cost of living continues to rise, it seems surprising to me that we would not take more care and concern as to how much we eat and more importantly how much we leave on the plate.

This is a society that misjudges food; this is a society that doesn’t value food.

Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, London.

Previous generation were brought up with the old adage to finish our meals because there are ‘children starving in (insert country)’. However now it doesn’t seem to be important, maybe this is because we are willing to sacrifice those kinds of values simply for time with our families. Our working lives take up so much of our time that it can be difficult to maintain a balance between achieving a healthy lifestyle for ourselves and our children and just achieving a life that’s away from work.

It is not just on these shores that food is wasted. In 2002, South Korea was said to have wasted more then $6 billion worth of food. That figure is frightening enough but it is made to look even worse when one considers that the total of waste was more then the amount of food made available in North Korea in 2001.

Earlier this year nearly €10,000 was spent on the Zimbabwe president, Robert Mugabe’s 83rd Birthday celebrations. Prize cattle herds were slaughtered for the event. While the figure quoted for the party may seem small it should be noted that the annual inflation rate in Zimbabwe is nearly 1,600%, easily the highest in the world. It is expected to rise to 4.000% by the end of 2007.

As a result of this the once thriving agricultural industry’s production has now halved over the last five years. The country seems to be in chaos with rations in place for the majority of the population yet the leaders eat well. It’s shocking to think that something like this could exist but unfortunately it does.

As of 2004, world wide poverty had increased by 20 million bringing the total number of people starving in the world to over 852 million. The phrase ‘waste not want not’ seems to have disappeared from our memory.

Until we can learn once again how to properly use and conserve food; we will constantly be looking at the poverty stricken countries wondering why the gap is as big as it is. Charity should begin at home, shouldn’t it? The first thing we can do is not to waste what we have.