Thanksgiving: a time you feast as if you were on death row. You’re going to be munching on a giant carcass, mashed potatoes, stuffing, little tiny onions and a delicious cheesecake. Even if you’re just a family of four you have cooked for a family of 12. After a couple of days, all of those leftovers will likely be placed inside the garbage bin.
If anyone ever found out then you’ll be chastized by your fellow man for this wasteful behavior. Remember, as our grandparents would say, there are people starving on the other side of the world.
Every few months or so, a report is released that highlights the tremendous amount of food waste. The latest study says that 40 percent of the food produced in the United States is wasted. Many of us are guilty of discarding food: we toss leftovers in the garbage and we don’t finish enough of our produce by the time we head to the grocery store the following week.
The U.S., in addition to Canada, Great Britain, France and every other developed nation, produces an abundance of food, both healthy and unhealthy. We produce so much food that obesity has become an epidemic in the Western world. People eat so much that they could die from being too fat.
This isn’t the case for many regions of Africa, South America or Asia.
Meanwhile, at this time of the year, millions of Americans will eat more, and shop more. As George Carlin joked years ago: America’s national pastime is no longer baseball it’s eating and shopping. It’s an insightful comment, but isn’t it better than what we see in Africa?
At this very moment in parts of Africa and Asia, for instance, tens of thousands of people are suffering and dying from famine, starvation and disease. In anytown, USA, a large number of people are overweight. In anytown, Ethiopia or North Korea, a large number of the population is skin and bones.
In Africa, dictators have embraced socialism, central economic planning and totalitarianism. They don’t care about their populations, who are dying every single day from hunger. Free markets and capitalism are non-existent in many of these places. Anytime a bag of rice is dropped down on the ground from the United Nations or non-governmental organizations (NGOs), people trek three hours from their homes and fight to grab that bag to hopefully feed their family.
A supper for these people is boiled rice. A supper for us is pretty much anything we want.
People in Africa wouldn’t dare to waste their rice. For us, we would throw it in the garbage if it isn’t edible enough for our palates.
No one will argue that wasting food is a dumb idea. You’re essentially throwing money into the garbage. But the point is is that we should be grateful that we have the option of being able to waste our food. If the food isn’t good, we can simply head on over to the grocery store or a restaurant and purchase some food to ensure we’re not hungry.
Since we’re on the cusp of the Christmas season, let’s take a look at the finale of the iconic holiday picture “A Christmas Story.” At the end, the Christmas dinner is destroyed so instead of starving for the day, the middle-class family goes to a Chinese restaurant. If that was only an option for a poor family in Uganda or Sri Lanka.
We may garner an annual chuckle on Black Friday when the videos of consumers fighting each other for a television or a pack of batteries pour into YouTube. However, we should ask: isn’t it a better alternative than fighting each other over cornstarch, toilet paper and bread like they’re doing in Venezuela (SEE: Video shows sad footage of Venezuela’s food crisis)?
The answer is a definitive yes.
–AM
We should be grateful for being overstuffed, wasteful, irresponsible Pigs on steroids???
You should have been a politician, or maybe a Used Car salesman, Mr. Moran. Lol…
The operable point is the matters spelled out above aren’t the only options perspectives people can relate to. The all-or-nothing options imagery is about out of ammo.