Food Part II

As I said in my previous post, we have too much food in our house. For some reason, we are (or at least I am) drawn to new things rather than the things we're supposed to eat, like leftovers. It's more exciting to tear open a brand-new package of cereal or oats than it is to eat the same old stuff you've had for weeks on end. This phenomenon (our desire to eat new things) has led to an overabundance of leftovers. And nobody likes leftovers, except for starving children in Africa. 

Starving children in Africa makes me think of an interesting Scientific American I read last year. It said that nutritionally, there was enough food in the world for everybody (or at least most of us), but that because of unequal distribution, we have a hunger crisis in many parts of the world. Even when we eat at restaurants, we are often not able to finish what's on our plate. So the restaurant throws it away and the food is wasted. When we eat out too much/have too much food/both, some percentage of our food is going to go bad. And that percentage is wasted.

I watch the news every night and I heard an interesting story about the dramatic rise in wheat prices. A bushel that used to cost $5.11 now costed $10.00, which led (or at least has the potential to lead) to a domino effect--prices of flour went up, prices of goods made of flour (bread, noodles) went up, customers can't buy as much. Who knows if this is a bad thing? Many of us have all the food we need. Unfortunately, the bakery that isn't managing to sell the high-priced bread probably isn't going to give the leftovers to starving children in Africa.