Hungry kya?

Folks,

Do you eat to live or live to eat?

While most of us might just take a moment off and start thinking about our culinary experiences..
Imagine this..

There are about 250 million Indian people who cannot answer this question.

Take a moment off and picturize a typical scenario.. its 1:30 p.m at work, your lunch hour is about to end but you are still stuck with a meeting with boss. There is no hope for lunch in sight and your stomach starts groaning in pain while your head spins out occasional hallucinations of food. 


Havent we all experienced this feeling? The stomach wrenching feeling called being hungry...

Now multiply this feeling three folds and imagine some 20 crore Indians who will be sleeping with pain in their guts tonight! Or the plight of some 250 million Indians living in a state of chronic starvation everyday!

Hunger remains the No.1 cause of fatality in India, much ahead of ailments like Cancer, TB, HIV or malaria. According to UN and government reports, 25 lakh Indians die very year due to the curse of hunger!

But the issue is not as narrow as hunger alone; there is a bigger devil called malnourishment. More than 70 percent of Indian women and children are equipped with some form of nutritional deficiency such as anemia and around 30% of all newborns are born underweight. What future does it boast of these mothers, kids and their next families? 

Despite substantial improvement in health sector since independence and a GDP growth rate of 7-8 percent, under-nutrition remains a silent emergency in India.

So are we really food-deficient to serve the hungry people? Or even the current growth rate is not sufficient to feed one and all... Nonsense!

On the contrary, India is the second largest producer of food in the world and India’s economy is primarily agricultural. Surely lack of food produce cannot explain why a UN survey says that right in the heart of country, within the state of Madhya Pradesh alone, there are more under nourished children than the entire Sub-Saharan Africa!

What explains this paradox? Here is what I think..

Ours is a food wasting country!
We waste food at many levels..  but based on little personal research, I broadly classify them into two: 
1. governance level and 2. social level. At governance level, the issue mainly arises from lack of adequate storage and transport mechanisms leading to much food wastage annually.

However I will focus on a more personally approachable point of social wastage. Tons of foods are wasted everyday at social gatherings like marriages and other functions across the country. As per food ministry data, 20% of cooked food at weddings, parties or restaurants is quite normally wasted. One more record says that the level of food wasted each day at weddings and family functions in Bombay alone would be enough to feed the city’s enormous slum population. 

Shameful indeed!

So can we do something as individuals and society to stop this criminal wastage?
Yes!

I believe the following four pointers are very reasonable, approachable and practical:

-         Finish your leftovers – While visiting restaurants we often order more than we can chew. The moment our stomach is full we tend to treat the half filled bowl of our ordered dish as an undigestable meal. Do you think it is right? Though some of us think a bit extra by getting leftover packed and leave it with the first unfortunate soul we find on the way.

But I ask you again, is this practice also right? Isn’t it demeaning to even to a needy and hungry person to leave your tit-bits for him to feed on? If you care not to waste, pack it up, store in a fridge and consume the next day; the food will still be good.

-         Feed the hungry – As I said do not demean the hungry by simply disposing your extra food on them. If you want to feed a person, do it with an open heart. Cook extra or order separately and give some person a respectful meal.

-         Manage your refrigerator – We often freeze food items in the fridge and then push them back only to make space for more food items. Once pushed back, the older food is history only to be uncovered the day we sit down to clean our fridge! Keep an orderly fridge, so that all the stored food is within visible range and you can take out things anytime. Also, keep your refrigerator temperature set to an optimum level of coolness.

-          Party hard, save harder – Left with a lot of extra food at your house party? Do not let it be thrown. Think of all the hungry who can make use of it. Talk to your caterers beforehand and arrange for a system for leftovers. There are organizations these days that will gladly pick up the tons of food left at the wedding and distribute it to the needy. One such organisation is Arham Yuva group (http://www.arham.org/)
 

Friends, we are living in a society where millions starve for things we take for granted. All I am asking today is a bit more responsibility and a bit more thoughtfulness in our actions. 

Lastly, I just want to quote Mother Teresa on this subject:

 “When a poor person dies of hunger, it has not happened because God did not take care of him or her. It has happened because neither you nor I wanted to give that person what he or she needed.”