My Christmas letter! FOOD IS LIFE Dear Food, No words can fully express how much we love you. You are our loyal companion, always there to feed us, to nourish us and to cheer us up when we are down. It is impossible to recall a happy occasion when you were not there: birthdays, reunions, anniversaries. You are adaptable and versatile, willing to be sown and grown or bred and tamed, and to be eventually transformed into something palatable and delicious. You never turn down our demanding tastes - be it cold or hot, sweet or bitter, raw or cooked. You deserve the best of our resources and so we willingly give you half the land, two-thirds of available freshwater, one-tenth of energy resources and one-sixth of our workforce. It is unfortunate that nowadays many people are suspicious of you and depict you as our worst enemy. They accuse you of being a source of disease, allergies and health problems that jeopardize the quality of our lives and lead us to tragic consequences. Nothing could be farther from the truth. You will never betray us. Relationships are complex and challenging and the relationship between you and us is no exception. Relationships can be problematic at times but if the relationship is filled with respect, wisdom, self-control and appreciation for all those involved then all can go well. In truth, we should be apologizing to you because of the many ways in which we mistreat and misuse you. First of all, we apologize for wasting and discarding you in large quantities. Part of the loss occurs because you are perishable, though that is fact rather than fault. The major losses are due to inefficiency in the food supply chain, through which we lose 39% of you, and our obsessive consumerist and aesthetic-focused culture that rejects anything perceived less than perfect. The amount of you we throw into garbage bins at home combined with the amount discarded by supermarkets and left uneaten at restaurants adds to an incredible 61% of the total food loss. Shame on us! This amount of wasted food, if redistributed, could alleviate the strain of nearly 100 million people living in households without a secure source of food. The great tragedy is that we waste you not necessarily because you do not taste good but because we take too much of you and dislike eating anything leftover or store you improperly in the fridge or just forget about you. Sometimes we discard you simply because you do not look pretty enough; perfectly edible fruits are tossed away because of a few bruises. The problem is that we, living in developed and industrialized societies, take you for granted because you are available everywhere, at any time, in abundance and at an affordable price. And there are still more ways we mistreat you. We invest large sums of money, natural resources and labour to grow you but at the end of it all we leave you in the fields to die because, in spite of knowing that world-wide demand of you is growing, it costs us more to harvest you than to let you go to waste. We will also use an incredible amount of money, resources and labour to intentionally destroy you, causing negative environmental impacts such as water pollution, soil erosion, and greenhouse gas emissions. Is there any logic to our kind of thinking? We contemplate, then debate and go out to raise awareness about the millions of people who struggle to find food to eat on a daily basis while at the same time we come up with the brilliant idea to grow you, food to be, and then turn you into biofuel which is hailed as the greatest renewable energy source for the future. Hard to believe, right? Better to call it for what it really is: an insult to those who are starving to death. Sadly, in todays news its become common to find reports of food advisories and recalls. And so the paradox of our relationship emerges: we need you to survive and yet contaminate you without a second thought once profit enters the equation. You sustain life and yet we use you in ways that damage our bodies or even cause death. The practice of committing food fraud is beyond the lowest moral standard and the extensive lengths we will go to manipulate our foods for monetary reasons confirm that human fantasy is without limit. Practically anything can be unscrupulously labelled and traded for human consumption. When institutions responsible for implementing and monitoring food safety have to lay down obvious safety benchmarks, namely no food intended for sale should be unfit for human consumption, it is depressing indeed. We delude ourselves by being clever with words, using them to flatter you while at the same time silencing our own conscience. We love you and choose you because you are pure, virgin, natural, organic, biodynamic, locally-grown, farm-to-table food. You must blush at so many complements. But for you, being good is more than enough. With love. Credits to A. Reich and J. Foley, for their research on Food Loss and Waste, summarized by YouTube Video: Love Letter to Food - youtu.be/-5i-dCv7O8o
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 03:32:20 +0000
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