Thoughts on Food

For as long as I can remember food has been a big focus of my daily life. I think about the next meal or the one I’ve recently eaten or one I’d like in the future. I love thumbing through cookbooks and still check/cook my old favorites frequently. I also look up recipes online, reading all the reviews and often trying something new.
In elementary school, I looked forward to going home for lunch each day, anticipating the leftover stew or chop suey or pickle and bologna sandwich that awaited me. As a young mother I looked forward to Thursday night when Max would stay with the children while I did a week’s shopping. Much of Thursday was spent planning menus for the next week and making up the shopping list based on the weekly supermarket sales.
Today I still start the morning looking forward to the meals of the day. If I’m lucky there will be leftovers for lunch and maybe a new recipe to try for dinner.
Food related articles in magazines and newspapers always get my attention. Recently I read a blog by Tara Parker-Pope in the NY Times called From Farm to Fridge to Garbage Can. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/from-farm-to-fridge-to-garbage-can/ She quoted some studies that were mind-boggling. When a survey asked people why they didn’t cook at home they got a variety of answers, time, as expected, was a big factor but 28% of the respondents said they didn’t know how to cook. I’ll go back to that another time.
Another interesting bit of information was the relatively small part of our income that goes to food in the United States. We spend roughly 10% today, down from 25% in 1930 but really striking when compared to countries like Ethiopia where food accounts for 70% of income.
Our food is incredibly inexpensive compared to the rest of the world and yet we waste more than 40% of it according to Jonathan Bloom, author of American Wasteland : How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food. A link took me to a blog he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, Help the Planet : Stop Wasting Food. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703440004575548391291973152.html?
There’s something disturbing about the fact that nearly half of our population is overweight, we throw away nearly half of our food and in other parts of the world, people are starving. There isn’t much I can do to remedy the world’s food inequalties but I can redouble my efforts to make sure that I don’t buy food that we aren’t likely to eat, I can make sure that there isn’t a pepper or a cucumber turning to mush in the back of the fridge or a container of yogurt or piece of cheese growing green stuff. And of course I will compost the scraps that don’t get eaten.