THE HUNGRY AND THE FULL!

This blogpost has been written for UNEP World Environment Day's blog-competition . This year's theme is 'Think.Eat.Save - Reduce your foodprint' 

     I am in an exquisitely decorated wedding hall, teeming with people dressed-up in multihued, extravagantly sequined, silk and satin drapes. As soon as the dinner serves, all the elegantly dressed people rush towards serving tables. I stand one step away from the jam-packed tables, with an empty plate in my hands, waiting for my turn. All the sophistication lies abandoned at the seats while the people, crowding the feast-serving tables, eye for their handsome shares. Its bad manners to peek over someone’s plate, but it becomes inevitable when a mountain of salad, rice and curry towering over people’s plates, appeal for your attention. The food is sumptuous, agreed! But alas, we have only one belly to stuff all that food. The competition is stiff, but in the end, it’s the belly that wins. And so I see, at the end of the session, half-finished plates piling up on the tables. 

     Next, we see them being dumped into waste bins and then, off they go, floating with the gushing water streams or settling in landfills. This is a common sight in urban weddings of South Asian countries where weddings are vibrant, lavish and once-in-a-lifetime affairs! Estimates suggest about 15-20% of food, served in such events, is squandered. However, once you step out of this grandeur, reality hits you hard as you see children, in tattered clothes, starving and going through dumpsters, picking up food leftovers. You cannot go on, unaffected.

      A glance through this social diary makes me leaf through my personal diary! While three-time meals a day with additional tea and snack breaks is standard for most of us, there are people who find it hard to manage even two-meals per day. This is just not fair! I consider myself a ‘responsible’ eater, but a research study indicates that the annual per capita waste production in South Asia is between 6Kg and 11Kg. There’s got to be something wrong! So, I skim through my eating and squandering behaviors, looking for loopholes and here’s what I find; granted that I am not ‘the habitual squanderer’ who stockpiles food and throws them away once they are mold-ridden, expired or all soggy-ed up, the fact is I do get sloppy at times, and such sloppiness can take a heavy toll on the overall quotient of food wastage and even not just that, it magnifies the volume of waste (hence solid waste pollution) and contributes to global warming (courtesy methane emissions from landfills where food wastes eventually get dumped). So, I sit down and draft a crude plan which looks like this;

Dont's:

• Stock fruits in the fridge, lest they become soggy. Buy fresh fruits!
• Cook meals in excess. In case of leftovers, eat them the next day.
• Cook new meal until the last one has been finished.

Do's:

• Grocery shopping sensibly.
• In case of surplus food supplies, share with neighbors or the needy ones.
• Grow fresh vegetables and fruits in my garden.

     Once done, I feel good, as if a part of the global movement aimed at bringing food wastage down. Inspired, I google food saving initiatives. I take comfort in the fact that there are many people raising their voice against the food wastage trend. FAO’s initiative SAVE FOOD, together with many key partners, is probably the most vigorous drive for reducing food squandering. Similarly, UNEP’s World Environment Day theme ‘Think.Eat.Save’ is also expected to play a significant role in trimming down food wastes. According to an estimate, saving on current food wastes can nourish about 3 billion otherwise underfed people? So, I have decided to start with the man (in my case a woman) in the mirror. What about you?

Visit: http://unep.org/wed/

http://www.thinkeatsave.org/