TOPIC - Half the world’s harvested food is wasted

Half the world’s harvested food is wasted. We still have many people starving across the world. Why do we in developed countries waste food when so many go hungry? In the developed world supermarkets reject much harvested food because of appearance, would you buy misshapen carrots, bananas etc? If so why do we allow supermarkets to waste so much food? Households throw out 30-50% of the food bought, why is this? What should we do about it? 

CHECK out: http://www.thinkeatsave.org/docs/Factsheet_FOOD-WASTAGE.pdf

So how wasteful are we? Well it’s a lot easier not to be so wasteful when it’s just the two of you or you’re on your own. You buy as you need, No weekly shops. But we still allow ourselves to be dictated to by the large supermarkets to a certain extent. Their over conservative date stamping begs us to throw away items that pre date stamping days would have lasted another week. How long is it since you ripped the blue mould off a slice of bread before toasting it? And yet I grew up in a house where that was how you started your day. We’re so used to perfect carrots and pristine strawberries now that we hesitate before popping that crooked parsnip into the pot. Does that look a bit off to you? That’s a most unattractive turnip, don’t you think? In reality too many non photogenic potatoes get dumped by us all when they all get chopped up at the end of the day. It’s about time we all started fighting for the rights for our sprouts to be ugly and our cabbage to be muddy.  

But we’re not the only ones to blame. Restaurants and cafés churn out endlessly huge portions and tend to have a one size fits all policy. Children, the elderly, growing boys: everyone gets the same. You wouldn’t set your toddler down a plate the same size as your 17 year old teenager would you? But I suppose if portion size was up to the restaurant staff you might get a few disgruntled customers when things went wrong. Am I getting that huge plate of chicken broccoli because she thinks I’m a big fat lump?  Or the other thing they do is they lay it all out in a buffet and leave it all up to us. And what do we do? We go and get a bit of everything until our plates are piled so high that we can hardly carry them back to the table. We’ll never eat that!! Daft, aren’t we? But restaurants could offer small, normal and large portions couldn’t they? That could reduce the waste.

But it’s in hospitals and nursing homes where there is so much waste. Sick people don’t tend to have much of an appetite and the elderly, well, what with all those cups of tea and biscuits throughout the day, who has any room left for extra helpings of shepherd’s pie? We need Jamie Oliver into our hospitals and nursing homes. He’ll sort us out there. If Jamie was cooking no matter how sick I was I bet you every morsel would disappear.  Or my Alan. No-one can resist his roast leg of lamb or garlic and lemon chicken.

Of course we need to be teaching our young people how to grow their own. Bring back allotments! If you’ve spent all that time digging and mucking about with your very own green beans there’ll be no wastage to speak of. (Allotments available at reduced rates throughout January. Contact my son-in-law for further information.)

Well time draws on and we’ve run out of time to talk about Jimmy Saville and our celebrity obsession. I dare say there’ll be more horrors emerging in the press before our next meeting anyway. It doesn’t seem to be going away, does it? And we’ll leave the Tea Party guys for another day too. And so to our finale.