As a child who was brought up by a mother whose formative childhood experience of food was growing up in wartime austerity, I carry with me a deep-seated abhorrance of food wastage. I hear an inner voice reminding me that I should clear my plate, reminding me of the plight of the many on our globe who do not have enough. I feel guilty for taking more than I can eat and I have in the past felt badly for the way that we have been seduced from time to time into overpurchasing. It is this latter dimension of the issue that seems strangely absent from this otherwise helpful report.
The thing that I think needs to be kept before us is the marketing of food by supermarkets. They are interested in selling as much as possible to get as much money circulating into their own internal economies. So BOGOF may look good but unless we have proper strategies for actually eating the stuff we end up wasting the food but having only paid for one (ostensibly) we don't really notice. And then there are all the seductive messages about the healthy food we can buy, so we buy it alongside all the fatty treats we normally buy and naturally fail somehow to eat the good stuff, but feel better at the checkout for having done so: guilt-alleviation purchases that rarely get eaten.
So here's my suggestion for something to do at least at Lent and Advent: do a stock take of your food throwaways and use that to replan your shopping strategies. If you are throwing away certain foodstuffs, ask yourself what the practical psychologies of obtaining and usage actually are. Are you buying stuff like some of us tend to buy books (on the basis that you hope to get round to reading it someday)? Are you actually finding that you feel too tired to prepare it and so end up in the junk-food end of your fridge and freezer, or reaching for the takeaway number?
In a world where many of our brothers and sisters find it hard to discern the positive answer to the prayer they pray for daily bread, those of us who throw 'daily bread' away, should consider how the world's systems of food distribution have become distorted and take more responsibility for restoring God's purposes. Our 'your kingdom come' might then be their 'daily bread'.
And that's before we think about the environmental impact of unnecessarily transporting the stuff in the first place, and then the costs of disposal... our waste of food is not an insignificant factor in costing us the earth.
Technorati Tags: food, wastage, UK, daily_bread
"Our research has found that about half of the food we throw away could have been eaten," Jennie Price, the Wrap chief executive, said. "There is a real opportunity here for us to both save some money and help the environment by making a few small changes.
The striking point which emerges from the research is that only 10% of those asked realised they were throwing much food away."
The thing that I think needs to be kept before us is the marketing of food by supermarkets. They are interested in selling as much as possible to get as much money circulating into their own internal economies. So BOGOF may look good but unless we have proper strategies for actually eating the stuff we end up wasting the food but having only paid for one (ostensibly) we don't really notice. And then there are all the seductive messages about the healthy food we can buy, so we buy it alongside all the fatty treats we normally buy and naturally fail somehow to eat the good stuff, but feel better at the checkout for having done so: guilt-alleviation purchases that rarely get eaten.
So here's my suggestion for something to do at least at Lent and Advent: do a stock take of your food throwaways and use that to replan your shopping strategies. If you are throwing away certain foodstuffs, ask yourself what the practical psychologies of obtaining and usage actually are. Are you buying stuff like some of us tend to buy books (on the basis that you hope to get round to reading it someday)? Are you actually finding that you feel too tired to prepare it and so end up in the junk-food end of your fridge and freezer, or reaching for the takeaway number?
In a world where many of our brothers and sisters find it hard to discern the positive answer to the prayer they pray for daily bread, those of us who throw 'daily bread' away, should consider how the world's systems of food distribution have become distorted and take more responsibility for restoring God's purposes. Our 'your kingdom come' might then be their 'daily bread'.
And that's before we think about the environmental impact of unnecessarily transporting the stuff in the first place, and then the costs of disposal... our waste of food is not an insignificant factor in costing us the earth.
Technorati Tags: food, wastage, UK, daily_bread
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