23) What a Waste
During the first few days we were in the delivery business we needed to see the manager of Franklins about something. One of the staff told us he was in the back section, near the fridges and told us to just go through. We found him standing beside three crates of milk. Each crate held six bottles and each bottle 2 litres (36 litres) and he was opening each bottle and pouring it into the sink. I was amazed and asked him if it had gone rancid but he told me that it had just passed its ‘sell by’ date so he could not sell it. I stuck my finger into it to taste it and there was nothing wrong with it at all. I asked him if he couldn’t give it to an orphanage or an old peoples home or something, rather than throw it away. He told me that he could not give it to anyone, his staff, the homeless shelter or even a local farmer to be fed to the pigs. It was passed the ‘sell by’ date so it had to be disposed of.
I remembered this incident when I recently read an article on the Internet about how much food the world wastes. It said that Australia throws away 3 million tonnes of food a year, the equivalent of 145 kilograms for every man, woman and child. I am sure that Australia is not alone among wealthy nations to have this fault but having spent so many years in the third world we have learnt not to be too fussy. I once told someone that I only threw out food if it had long green mouldy hair on it. When I saw the horror on her face I had to explain that I was only joking but that I did feel that a lot of food was wasted here because of the ‘use by’ date. Many of the Australian people have grown so used to this practice that they have begun to think that everything automatically goes bad on that date and would not think of eating or drinking it after that. Many companies are so afraid of litigation that they are not willing to take the risk of selling products that are not 100% and probably all have a wide safety margin. Of course I could be cynical and say that if the companies can get the public to throw away more food and replace it with a fresher product they will obviously make more money.
I well remember my mother taking milk that had gone sour and putting it into a muslin bag. She would then hang it over the sink in the kitchen so that the whey (the liquid portion) would drip off, leaving the curds (the solid portion) to continue to mature into a soft cheese, rather like Feta. She called it Cavallo cheese, and I think that Cavallo is the word for horse in Italian so I suppose this was “horse cheese”. Although we girls did not like it all the adults seemed to so I suppose it was for a more mature palate and the adults did not seem to be harmed in any way by it.
In Africa food that is passed its prime condition is given away, given away not sold, to orphanages, old peoples homes and the very poor. I am sure that it does them more good than harm. But as there are not so many really poor people in Australia and no one wants to take the chance, however slight it might be that someone will get sick, a great deal of perfectly good food is just wasted.
It’s obvious that not every man, woman and child actually throws away 145 kilograms of food each year so a great deal must be thrown out by the producers, the wholesalers and the retailers. Are we producing too much? Many people in Africa and Asia cannot produce enough to feed themselves and yet the Western world throws so much away. Surely we should be able to come up with a solution to this problem. When we first came to live here I was very impressed by the amount of food, especially the fruit and vegetables piled high on the shelves. I wondered who could consume it all. But I have learnt now that so much of it is just thrown away and find it disturbing.
In this day and age when science has so many answers, we can put a man on the moon, give a person a new heart or lung. We can sew back a severed finger and operate on an unborn foetus. We can increase the yield of our fields with fertilisers or with genetically modify crops to give us bumper harvests but we can’t seem to work out how to have the right amount of food in the right place and at the right time.
I remembered this incident when I recently read an article on the Internet about how much food the world wastes. It said that Australia throws away 3 million tonnes of food a year, the equivalent of 145 kilograms for every man, woman and child. I am sure that Australia is not alone among wealthy nations to have this fault but having spent so many years in the third world we have learnt not to be too fussy. I once told someone that I only threw out food if it had long green mouldy hair on it. When I saw the horror on her face I had to explain that I was only joking but that I did feel that a lot of food was wasted here because of the ‘use by’ date. Many of the Australian people have grown so used to this practice that they have begun to think that everything automatically goes bad on that date and would not think of eating or drinking it after that. Many companies are so afraid of litigation that they are not willing to take the risk of selling products that are not 100% and probably all have a wide safety margin. Of course I could be cynical and say that if the companies can get the public to throw away more food and replace it with a fresher product they will obviously make more money.
I well remember my mother taking milk that had gone sour and putting it into a muslin bag. She would then hang it over the sink in the kitchen so that the whey (the liquid portion) would drip off, leaving the curds (the solid portion) to continue to mature into a soft cheese, rather like Feta. She called it Cavallo cheese, and I think that Cavallo is the word for horse in Italian so I suppose this was “horse cheese”. Although we girls did not like it all the adults seemed to so I suppose it was for a more mature palate and the adults did not seem to be harmed in any way by it.
In Africa food that is passed its prime condition is given away, given away not sold, to orphanages, old peoples homes and the very poor. I am sure that it does them more good than harm. But as there are not so many really poor people in Australia and no one wants to take the chance, however slight it might be that someone will get sick, a great deal of perfectly good food is just wasted.
It’s obvious that not every man, woman and child actually throws away 145 kilograms of food each year so a great deal must be thrown out by the producers, the wholesalers and the retailers. Are we producing too much? Many people in Africa and Asia cannot produce enough to feed themselves and yet the Western world throws so much away. Surely we should be able to come up with a solution to this problem. When we first came to live here I was very impressed by the amount of food, especially the fruit and vegetables piled high on the shelves. I wondered who could consume it all. But I have learnt now that so much of it is just thrown away and find it disturbing.
In this day and age when science has so many answers, we can put a man on the moon, give a person a new heart or lung. We can sew back a severed finger and operate on an unborn foetus. We can increase the yield of our fields with fertilisers or with genetically modify crops to give us bumper harvests but we can’t seem to work out how to have the right amount of food in the right place and at the right time.
posted by MC @ 6:24 AM
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