Day 7: Garlic Mouth

Hey.  What you lookin' at?!

I was feeling uncreative when I got home and gave my rice some Lawry's hair and eyes and a garlic powder mouth.  Ugh.  Not smart.  Because now I have a garlic mouth too.  

My stomach is definitely smaller and as I type this, I can feel that pitty feeling in my stomach.  I couldn't imagine being a small child and not knowing when my next meal would be.

I was telling my sister-in-law about when I would go to my grandmother's when I was younger and, if I didn't eat all the food on my plate, she would say, "You need to finish your food.  There are starving children in Ethiopia/Africa/The World."  It is a very true statement, but it made me feel guilty.  When I throw out food, I feel that guilt all over again.

Now, I should feel something when I throw out food that is edible or even food that I know that I've let go bad.  I should feel something.  But I think there has to be a better way to teach children and adults to care for those who are hungry without making them feel guilt for the blessings in their lives.  

How do you teach your children about these things?

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I think that I'm a visual learner.  It's easier for me to remember things once I've done them or after repeating it over and over and over.  I used to learn speeches by writing them down, sentence by sentence, until I remembered them.

Yesterday, I found information on food waste, but I was hoping that I could get a picture or something like that.  While I couldn't find a pile or a visual image that would really drive the point home, I did find an article that was in the New York Times in 2008 entitled "One Country's Table Scraps, Another Country's Meal" that had an image.

The article is very good, pointing out that a quarter of the crops in Africa go bad before they can be eaten because of a lack of technology and infrastructure as well as humidity and bugs.

Also, one of the best quotes from the article, by Andrew Martin:
"Of course, eliminating food waste won’t solve the problems of world hunger and greenhouse-gas pollution. But it could make a dent in this country and wouldn’t require a huge amount of effort or money. The Department of Agriculture estimated that recovering just 5 percent of the food that is wasted could feed four million people a day; recovering 25 percent would feed 20 million people."

You can view the article HERE.