Who's Wasting Food?

It's not just filling your gas tank which is getting very expensive these days -- so is filling your face. The cost of basic food is spiraling, and even in the relatively wealthy West, we are having to tighten our belts, which would not of course do most of us any harm.

No, the real harm is being done in Africa and the Third World, where they are threatened with starvation. Quite right then, that when the world leaders got together at the G8 summit in Japan, the global food crisis was top of the agenda.

Before he left these shores, our leader Gordon Brown addressed a few wise words to the nation on the subject. He told us all to stop wasting food and save some money in the process. Apparently we throw away seven million slices of bread every year and one million slices of ham. Imagine all those lost sandwiches.

Just cut back on all that waste, said Mr. Brown, save some money and help save the planet by reducing unnecessary demand. All eminently sensible. Trouble is the message does not seem to have got through to the G8 leaders. They promptly sat down to a six course lunch followed by an 18 course dinner.

There was truffle soup, and crab. Diced fatty flesh of tuna, caviar, smoked salmon, and a G8 fantasy dessert, waffles perhaps? Oh, and five different wines including champagne to wash it all down. Which just sounded to all those reporters shut outside the feast like, well, a bit like Marie Antoinette actually. She was the French Queen who said of the starving peasants who had no bread: "Let them eat cake."

Well today's message from the G8 leaders, to quote their menu, is: let them eat pink conger eel dressed with vinegar soy sauce. And so all those good intentions of helping feed the world were blown away in a blizzard of headlines. It was a spectacular PR bungle.

And the fact which truly will give our Prime Minister indigestion after that feast is that by all accounts he hates all that ostentatious consumerism. He really wanted to sit down and talk politics, not stuffed truffle. But what could he do? For that matter, what could your President do? They were the guests, and their Japanese hosts wanted to entertain in style.

And as a final thought, you have to feel extra-sorry for our Mr Brown. I mean, did he really fancy salt grilled bighand thornyhead fish with vinegary water pepper sauce, when the one thing he couldn't do was throw it away?
by Peter Allen