The Trouble With Kony 2012

     So I admit posting the Kony 2012 video for about 20 minutes yesterday. Despite my own reservations about the video, I thought it was a good cause to support. But then I started looking into Invisible Children. I had to remove the video. 
     While they have dubious fundraising records, a naive understanding of the facts and a worrisome savior complex, my real trouble with them is this photo below. This is NOT the gesture of a group that understands Uganda or human rights. Supporting and posing with rapists carrying guns (even if they are the army who oppose Kony) proves you just don't know what you're talking about. It's also dangerous.  Full credit to Invisible Children for getting people to talk about Joseph Kony. Seriously, bravo for that. There are great movements supporting Ugandan children, but this isn't one of them. Indeed, we must push to bring Joseph Kony to justice. But let's do it right. 

Food, Famine and the Scourge of Waste

           Today in the UK, 7 million slices of bread, 2.8 million tomatoes and 660,000 eggs will be thrown in the garbage. Most will be perfectly good and entirely edible.

The same amount will be thrown out tomorrow and the next day. As it was yesterday and the day before. In fact, these items make up just a small portion of the food that is wasted every single day in the UK.

Put together, more than $16 billion (US) a year is literally being thrown in the trash.

Such is the cruel irony of our age. As governments in the developed world face massive deficits and people in poor countries struggle to feed themselves, we are discarding expensive food on a mammoth scale.

Few of us give a second thought to the leftovers on our plate, the apple that just doesn’t look right, or the bread crusts we don’t like. But the problem of food waste is epidemic and the implications are severe.  

Of course, the UK is not the only offender, nor is it the worst.  Depending on who you believe, the United States throws out between 30 and 50 per cent of its food, totaling some $100 billion a year.

Compare that to the developing world, where food scarcity is common and Somalia is still being ravaged by famine. More than 1 billion people suffer from malnutrition and a child dies of hunger every six seconds.

So why the disparity? How can it be that so few waste so much, while the rest starve?

The biggest culprit is the culture of abundance so pervasive in many Western countries. We simply produce too much, far more than we need, and feel entitled to doing just that. Somehow, overproduction and overconsumption have become symbols of a free and democratic society.

And when we have too much, we simply throw it out. It doesn’t seem to matter, since there’s always more at the grocery store. Rows and rows of cheap packaged goods means we never have to worry about where our next meal will come from. 

Food, after all, is just another commodity. It’s long lost its true value. The days where your grandmother told you not to waste food because you’re lucky to have it are long gone.

But not all the news is bad. In pockets around the world, movements toward smarter shopping are gaining traction as people commit themselves to a responsible lifestyle.

More and more consumers are logging on to websites like www.wastedfood.com to find tips on food preservation—everything from advice on storing what you buy to recipes for your leftovers.

And for the food we do throw out, Sweden is leading the charge to turn organic waste into fuel. The country already has 7,000 cars and 800 buses that run on biogas.  In 2005, it even unveiled the world’s first biogas commuter train.

There’s still a lot of work to do, but these are important first steps. In the end, the way we view what we eat will only change once we realize just what it means to throw food away and what we are really losing when we do. 

There’s certainly nothing wasteful about that.