Fight food waste
THIS past week I read a worthy The Fiji
Times article from the Consumer Council of Fiji about reducing food waste in schools.
It said some of the nice, homemade packed lunches we send the little munchkins off with each school day was left uneaten. And, horrors, the most common practice was to chuck it in the bin.
Actually we knew that, didn’t we. In my day what we didn’t want or couldn’t swap with another kid who had real jam sandwiches and not peanut butter was chucked in the bin before we got home and mum found out.
We didn’t want it turning up as toasties on a dinner plate. Or suffering yet again through the lecture about starving children in other countries who would be thrilled and delighted to have a limp peanut butter sandwich or slightly squashed tomato.
If only, we thought.
In that era, the moral implications of wasting food were the focus. But this recent article also described the environmental costs in the wasted energy used to grow it, transport it, store and prepare it. Then there was the money spent to buy it, plus the costs of waste disposal and treatment.
When I think of costs I am tempted to shove a neatly julienned carrot stick into a recalcitrant child’s ear. The stick from a carrot well within living memory cost $1.30 kg and is now at least twice as much, not to mention the hooha of slicing it into delicate little shafts for tiny teeth to nibble.
In my experience slicing vegetables is something frequently involves pieces of a fingernail and an occasional fingertip in the mix on my chopping board, sometimes requiring visits to hospital emergency for a quick stitch-up job. All adding to the cost of food preparation.
So what to do? The article gave some serious advice, starting with involving children in the stages of shopping, preparing and packing food. This is intended to give them an understanding
of the efforts taken in buying and preparing food and by selecting items suitable to their liking.
The writer obviously doesn’t have a sevenyear-old and a four-year-old who appear to do competitive shopping.
First, they each want a shopping trolley, selected on speed potential rather than carrying capacity. They race up and down the aisles while I make genuine attempts to control them, trying to interest them in finding the biscuit section.
Not I want them to get biscuits, but I have to admit it is a favoured food of the junior generation. Much as we try to discourage it.
The four-year-old appears to be on a white diet… white bread, white rice, white noodles and don’t touch any of it with anything coloured, such as tomato sauce or fish or especially anything green. Banana gets a pass, but only if presented peeled and whole, not broken. Never mind it gets broken when you chew it.
I get them into the fresh food section where they proceed to select exotic items such as strawberries and totally ignore pawpaw. I’m not saying strawberries aren’t good, but they are also expensive and are more valued for their difference to familiar local produce than their taste.
Then they disappear leaving me to hope they haven’t actually made a break for it with a load of choccie biscuits.
When it is time to go through the checkout I have to make a serious attempt at finding them. One of them appears to have tried to climb into the trolley and is now stuck and bawling, the other one is hiding under the checkout counter and leaping out at unsuspecting shoppers.
I join the group of sensible adults looking appalled and asking each other where the parents are.
When I get to the checkout I find amongst the flour, rice and toilet paper I have acquired a large packet of sugary breakfast cereal, a bottle of prohibited fizzy drink, a ridiculously expensive ice-cream, several things with chocolate involved, a bottle of blue nail polish and a cheap plastic Spiderman toy.
None of the above complies with the sensible and serious attempt by their schools to encourage good nutrition and ban the bad stuff.
Helpfully, the Consumer Council provided a food waste survey chart on which to list the child’s reasons for not eating parts of their lunch:
I don’t like it; there was too much; I wanted to go out and play; I ran out of time to eat; any other reason.
All of the above, apparently.
Well then, what parts did you like?
The bean.
Oookay. Nothing else? A grudging admittance to having also eaten the apple was finally extorted from the seven-yearold.
The four-year-old didn’t eat any lunch. He claimed he had eaten it all before school.
The article helpfully gave the Consumer Council complaints email, complaints@consumerfiji.org.fj. I daresay it’s no use complaining to them about our junior generation. I’ll just go on the theory when they get hungry enough they’ll eat what we are prepared to provide in the way of healthy, nourishing food.