Do you know how much money you throw away in your trash each time you waste your food? Did you ever give a thought that there are thousands of people dying from hunger everyday? Today there are more than 40% of the food produced in the world is never eaten because of the lack of access, poor handling and excessive buying. Are we one of them? When we look around, we are nothing less than the other parts of the world; we are equally responsible to be blamed for all the causes and the different problems that is ever increasing today. Food is something we really don’t care about comparatively; think about the whole process of how food is finally ready in your plate. Do you ever think about the amount of energy required to produce even a single plate of food? Just because you can afford that doesn’t mean you can waste! Just because you have money that doesn’t give you the license to throw the food.The students did a sampling of ‘food-waste’ in and around the town of Kohima, covering almost 40 food-joints and in the process of meeting the different owners/managers/workers we could collect the following data. As per the survey atleast 80% of the customers have the habit of leaving behind the food an approximate of 4.25 kgs of food is wasted everyday ( for 40 food-joints=170 kgs/day, 5100kgs for a month and 61200kgs for a year) accounting for atleast 10.50% of the whole food prepared in a day is being wasted. The food wastes are usually fed to the animals (pig) or simply just throw in the trash-bin. So far there isn’t a proper preservative method even for the unserved food. There is a crystal clear suggestion from the owners and workers that the customers should know the limit and ask for the same. Here a thought for all our customers, Is it necessary for us to waste the ordered food? Or Is it a trend that we have to follow? Or Are you so rich and so plentiful that you don’t have a way to throw off your money/your parent’s money. Think about those thousands of people dying everyday for hunger, as a social being what do you have to do. The data issued by the University of Arizona says that the percentage of food waste in fast-food restaurants is about 9.55% which is even lesser than the amount of food wasted in our town.
There is an urgent need to mitigate and measure the waste of food so as the natural resources; the consumption of natural resources should provide an initial impetus for a new policy to keep the use of Natural Resources within sustainable limits. Look around our own native places in the resources like forests, clean water, fertile soils, biodiversity etc is replenishing so quickly that we can see and feel in a single generation time. Today the amount of consumption is double the production and that’s the fact that there is so much of degradation happening within our resources. Due to over exploitation of huge dense forest, the varieties of plants and animals, the land resources, the water resources are facing a tremendous threat. Inspite of us being blessed so much so that there is a rich amount of biodiversity where our forefathers and our parents once experienced and enjoyed the blessing of nature which become a story today. We call ourselves as an educated and learned generation; today what type of stories do you want to create? What trend do you want to set for the future generations? Or are we still in the same mind with the common people having the self centeredness and being so greedy over our natural resources that we want to exploit everything in our present generation. “A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his father’s, but borrow from his children” looking to this quotes what can we draw a conclusion, can we be a responsible person that we should have the mind of sustainability and give a little care for our next generation. The U.N. Secretary –General Ban Ki-moon says, “Although individual decisions may seem small in the face of global threats and trends, when billions of people join forces in common purpose, we can make a tremendous difference.” Today, can we take that step of responsibility to bring a change and make a difference for our only Earth.
