Reduce your foodprint

Do you think before you eat and see if you can save something from not ordering or cooking this or that extra food? How much food do we leave in our plate after we dine outside or eat at home? And did you know that May 28 was World Hunger Day and last Wednesday, the World Environment Day?

The World Hunger Day is commemorated globally that we may be aware of the great number of people worldwide that still suffer from hunger and malnutrition despite the advances in science and technology that allow us to produce more than we need. The World Environment Day is celebrated to make us aware of the damage we inflict on the environment as we compete with one another to get the most for ourselves from the world’s finite resources just to prove that we are smarter than our neighbors. Indeed, we only need very few things in life, most of which are actually free. We just complicate our lives by wanting more conveniences and luxuries that we think or were told we need.

According to the Social Weather Stations (SWS), in the Philippines involuntary hunger affected an estimated 19.2 percent of the population or 3.9 million families in the first quarter of this year. This came in the same quarter when the economy was reported to have grown by 7.8 percent. The first quarter hunger rate was higher than the 16.3 percent (3.3 million families) reported to suffer hunger in the last quarter of 2012, the year when the economy was also reported to have grown overall by 6.8 percent. This is not good because it also happened when the SWS reported that self-rated poverty fell from the last quarter of 2012 to the first quarter of 2013.

If many people still experience hunger despite the reported rapid economic growth and reduction in the extent of self-rated poverty, it only means that whatever improvement the Philippines gained so far under the new Aquino government, those in the bottom of our income pyramid did not see them.

We are not alone in the country with respect to hunger, though. Throughout the world, the increase in the number of hungry people never ceases. And now even rich countries also report seeing more hungry people among themselves, courtesy of the last global financial crisis that hit them badly more than the poor countries. In the US, many people lost their jobs which in turn caused them to lose their homes after they failed to pay the mortgage.

Knowing the increasing number of hungry people in the world and what hunger means, especially to the children, the World Environment Day fittingly had for its theme: “Think. Eat. Save. Reduce Your Foodprint,” with the focus on reducing food waste.

Do you know that up to a third of food that we produce is wasted? Even if only small fraction of the lost third is prevented, a lot of hungry people will be helped.

How do we waste food? Waste starts during harvest, until the harvest is milled, processed, distributed, retailed and consumed. However, with many of us now living in cities and working away from land where our food grows we do not see any more how inefficiently we trace and dry our rice, or transport our vegetables to the market. But surely, living in the city also affords us to see that many of us are wasting food by the tons daily in restaurants where we think is more prestigious now to eat and even at home when we host countless parties, starting from the birth of a child, annual birthday celebration, graduation from school, passing a board examination to weddings or even death in the family.

When we eat in restaurants, how many times have we left our table after eating with still a good fraction of the food we ordered left over but which many of us think “unsocial” to pack up and bring home? Whenever I have the chance to eat outside, I always look around for leftovers in other tables before they are cleaned up for new customers. More often than not, some food is still left. Why can we order what we already know is enough for us? Take that halo-halo, for example that I like to partake of in summer in a mall with my wife whenever we chance to go there. The plastic cup in which halo-halo is served is of no ordinary size, so that it is not unusual for me to see many of them still half-full when the customers leave. As for me and my spouse we long ago learned the trick of ordering just one cup of halo-halo for us and asking for an empty cup to divide the halo-halo between and have just enough to satisfy our desire.

One morning in the province more than 10 years ago, a couple visited us in our newly built house. The woman was a relative and the man a white foreigner. We did not stock fish or meat for our food as we prefer to buy them fresh from the market at nearby poblacion. So knowing that our guest will stay with us up to lunchtime we asked if they would like to have a certain kind of fish and this and that meat cooked in this or that manner. The man said no and that if we order fish it is one kind of fish only and if meat one kind of meat only and just a little for them. I knew what he meant for I often hear foreigners, including consultants that I worked with before, telling me that they were amazed that we Filipinos prepare lots of food when we have guests or hold parties. He was speaking of the truth and the truth is that that many of us in the country waste a lot of food though we know that those less capable than us in getting food because of social inequity are hungry somewhere.

Do you know that as more people get richer and change their diets to favor meat and dairy, they also cause a lot of poor people be hungry somewhere? “The UK Food Group suggests that the production of meat causes an annual ‘calorie loss’ around the world equivalent to the need of 3.5 billion people.” It also says: “The consequence of increasing demand for meat is the use of crops to feed livestock rather than humans.”