The "Speak Your Mind" section of Gulf News today highlighted reader's views on Food Wastage in UAE. Many of the readers have expressed their opinions on crazy wastage of food during Ramadan "feasting", which I had observed here a couple of days ago.Strangely though, 61% readers tend to agree - and perhaps are relaxed - over the fact that wastage of food in the UAE is at par with the rest of the world!
Personally this feedback was very depressing for me, and raised a few thoughts:
1) Is it necesssary that UAE is expected to run shoulder-to-shoulder with even the negative trends of the world (eg. food wastage)?
2) Is junk food mentality (to quote one of the respondents) one of the primary reasons for food wastage? Are we - due to better lifestyle - increasingly moving towards being a throw-away society?
3) Why do we have to order a lot more food than we can consume? Is there something to do with "Showing off" our prosperity status in public when we have a lot of "left-overs"?
4) In a structured society, driven to some extent by laws inspired by the Shariah, isn't there any way by which we can control the "visual hunger" for more food?
5) While a nationwide Food Recovery Program would definitely help, are the private sector companies the only ones held socially responsible for developing funds to fight hunger?
6) Couldn't the higher prices, that we see in garments and other lifestyle objects, be able to control "over spending" and hence wastage of food?
I'm sure readers would have more ideas to tackle this menace - Ramadan is a good time to start thinking!
(Addendum: Read comments posted on this article in UAE Community Blog).
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