Think!! Eat!! Save!!!

It was not a usual day for Rahul. The school had arranged for special classes for 5th standard, which has to be compulsorily attended by the students. Finally, he reached home by 5 PM. He was very much hungry and felt as if he had returned from a hunger strike.

“Am feeling very much hungry”, Rahul told his mom, while he was grumbling about the special class.

“Just give me 5 minutes. Will prepare hot and spicy bread pakora”, replied his mom and took the bread packet out of the refrigerator.

Unable to sustain the wrath of hunger, Rahul entered the kitchen straight-away to consume it at the place of production.

Feeling restless, he was monitoring the process of making the pakora. She has kept a tawa with oil on the stove and was cutting the bread slices. He realized that his mom had perfectioned the art of cutting the edges in the bread slice.

Rahul tried to understand the logic behind cutting the edge, but having realized that the hungerness is not allowing him to think, he asked the reason from his mom for cutting the edges. Though the question seemed irrelevant, but feeling the need to answer, she replied that cutting the edges would help in frying the pakoras better and making it tastier.

Immediately his thoughts went back to school, where his teacher was discussing about the food wastage.

Food is one of the basic needs for human beings.

We consume food to ensure that we get enough strength to carry our day-to-day activities and live a healthy life.
We are blessed and lucky to have breakfast, lunch and dinner on any given day.

Is this the case with everyone??

We call the first meal of the day as breakfast, since it breaks the long fasting we have (time gap between dinner and our first meal in the morning).

There are people on the planet, who do not even get food once a day and whenever they get to consume food, its sort of a breakfast for them (BREAK-THE-FAST). Several factors could be spotted for these imparity – economy of the country, earning potential of the people, status in the society, rising commodity cost.

Though most of us hear about the poverty across the world, or for that sake, see it in our day-to-day life, what have we done to overcome it, except for leisurely using the facilities. When the facilities are abundant, we are not even bothered about saving it.

How many of us have faced situations, where we do not like the food in a hotel/home and leave the food plate as it is, without eating?

How many of us have liked the food and ordered for more and then have wasted it for the sole reason of not able to consume further?

Have we ever realized the efforts taken and number of parties involved in getting a sack of rice to the market? The farmer sows the seeds, wait for months protecting the crops from insects and have to withstand the natural calamities too. 

Also, rain plays a major havoc, wherein less rainfall means under-supply of water to crops and more rainfall leading to destroying the crops. Then comes the harvesting season, where sky-rocketing efforts need to be put in to get the final output (rice). Not all the outputs are rewarded, as they have to encounter the middle-men to sell it at a decent price. Then it goes through a long exchange process between multiple parties, before it enters our households.

This is just the shortened explanation of one commodity. Similarly for each commodity, the efforts are many-folded to get the right output.

And what we do then. We do the easiest job. We waste them, without even bothering about the hard work that has been put by those mighty souls (or) not even bothering about the millions of souls who stay hungry without having access to food.

Few Facts that provide a better picture

• Undernutrition contributes to 2.6 million deaths of children under five each year - one third of the global total
• One out of six children -- roughly 100 million -- in developing countries is underweight.
• 66 million primary school-age children attend classes hungry across the developing world, with 23 million in Africa alone
• WFP (World Food Programme) calculates that US$3.2 billion is needed per year to reach all 66 million hungry school-age children

As the facts were slowly running in his mind, Rahul was brought back to the kitchen by the smell of pakoras. While he was feasting the pakoras, his mom asked about the day’s proceedings in school and Rahul smelled the right opportunity to enlighten his mom about food wastage.... 

Even that edge of the bread slice could have been a meal for someone.....

If Rahul can visualize the impact of food wastage, why can’t we????

Well, if still you are not interested in saving the planet, here is what lies in future for us: 
Can we consume Insects?????

Most of you would not be aware of the "World Environment Day". It falls on 5th June of each year and the theme for this year revolves around food wastage....For further details, log on to World Environment Day