Someone told me that to build up momentum, I need to write everyday. If I really want to change the world I need to change the duration between two of my blogs too. I cannot promise writing everyday, however since I logged in today too, I can write on two consecutive days at least for now.
So you guys must have become somewhat familiar with the kind of propaganda I might be promoting. Yes it is changing the world by changing ourselves. So here I come with one more doctrine that I sincerely follow:
"Waste no Food"...
I work in a large company with some 5 to 6 huge food courts each harbouring about 8 to 10 caterers with some 10K people eating there every single day (off course on weekends it's much less, we get them off). And every helping that we get is enough to feed some 100 anorexic models. Yes the quantity of food that we get is a lot and at some counters we can serve ourselves. However in both the cases we tend to go overboard with the food. It doesn't matter that the daal is of an obnoxious colour or the gobhi is floating in oil or that we don't even like the coconut chutney they serve, we fill it till the brim maneuvering the plate and ourselves to our friendly team with similar looking colourful plates. And then in all that office gossip, catching up on the grapevine, complaining about how bad the food has become, we somehow forget what we were thinking when we took so much food and then at the end of eating what we like, we simply go and throw the food. Yes on an average 70% throw 30% of the food. This is just the cafeteria that too in an office.
Move out, closer to the weekend and Bangalore - the garden city has only one mode of entertainment - that's eating out. It's definitely going out, ordering lots , trying out new tidbits of food as well as the news and then leaving it all to waste. Why did we order so much? Simple - we have the money to order all the food we can and then we have figures to watch so we can't always shove all of it down our throats.
Then let's move into our household - bread that craves for fungus because a new loaf was bought, old vegetables that were bought but out of laziness never cooked, delicacies that were supposed to be eaten but actually forgotten after lying in the the cold (fridge) for some weeks...why waste food here too.
It's only because it has not hit us yet. Just think about people who die out of starvation, little kids with malformed bodies because they never got enough food, mothers not being able to feed their Young ones because their share of nutrition was thrown in dustbins in offices & restaurants.
The next time you throw food - just "think", "picture" and "think" again. It won't use much of your brain cells, just maybe save some food:)
I used to see the same thing happening in my own college mess. We were a smaller community but the problem was the same. Ofcourse people threw away the extra food on their plates, but much of the unused food in the serving containers was also always thrown away daily. I always thought I would try to look for a way to supply this leftover food where it could be used, but I did nothing really.
ReplyDeleteit seems this is a problem quite widespread. if one successful model of redistribution could be found or created, other places may follow the example. And many thousands would get two square meals a day.