Food and waste

“I don’t want to eat” “please can’t you see I’m full” “I hate it when you nag me to finish my meal”

Those are the typical dialogues shouted out by the youngsters when they have more than enough on their plate. It’s even worse with adults who don’t understand the importance and don’t bother to tell their kids about its significance. We might not realize what our choices might lead to. When we don’t look around, we are missing out on so many critical issues of life. Starvation, famine, disease, malnutrition; they all come simultaneously as we speak of hunger. Food is an essential gift for everyone. It’s not important how we manipulate food to make it delicious or pretty, what’s important is not to waste it.

If we really try to look even the smallest corner of our community, we can see seven out of ten families waste their food just because they don’t feel like eating it. In Nepal, almost 60% of residents of Kathmandu throw away their food, which can clearly be seen either on the side of the road or in the gutter or in the sewer and many other creative places that they can dispose. They don’t even bother to realize other millions of our people inside and outside the capital are working hard to have even the small portion of it. Numerous festivals in Nepal mark our tradition and almost every one of them describes eating and it is not a surprise that we waste 40% of those foods in vain. If you roam around cities of Nepal at the morning, you can clearly visualize the demonstration being performed all around the place, mostly from restaurants and clubs. Have we become stupid with the adequate education that we have been given? From what I can recall, my school did aware me about starvation, they did educate me not to waste our food and I believe no school ever tells our kids to toss their food whenever they feel like it. So how come we are rotating the tradition? According to the UN, one-ninth of Nepal; that is nearly 27 million populations still face starvation. We somehow console ourselves once in a while that this is the last time that ‘I’ am throwing my food, but if we think of it, thousands of ‘me’ would make millions and hence the statistics would not end. According to world food programme, every year 15 million children die of starvation. Can we think just how horrifying it is to die of hunger? And how it must’ve been for the parents to see their children perish and them being utterly helpless to do anything at all? We might not know how it feels because we are so fortunate on not being in that condition but we should have a certain decency at least to feel their helplessness. We are at the brink of evolution but we shouldn’t forget where we should stand, and what our values should be.

It ought to be our responsibility to aware the young ones about certain crucial matters of the world, to at least make them acquainted with harshness even though they never will be in it. With our seniors, we respect them, and we are told to follow what they have sincerely taught us. Adults and seniors are the examples of how we should live because they know the simplicity of life, some might not even have grown up in a materialistic environment but if we see them waste food, it would not be a bad thing if we break that tradition. And finally it all comes down to our personal self, how can we possess the power to resist and urge ourselves to not exploit what we have and at least respect those who don’t have it. We must understand the consequences of this grave matter, we must be aware of what goes out of our house, and we must be concerned about how those unfortunate others are living so that even though we can’t directly aid, we can somehow help by changing our consuming behavior.