Throwing away food is like stealing from the poor – Pope Francis

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Pope Francis denounced on the occasion of World Environment Day 2013 the what he called a “culture of waste” in an increasingly consumerist world. He said that throwing away good food was like stealing from poor people.

“Our grandparents”, he said in his speech, “used to make a point of not throwing away leftover food. Consumerism has made us accustomed to wasting food daily and we are unable to see its real value”. This, alas, is so very true indeed.

“Throwing away food is like stealing from the table of those who are poor and hungry,” he continued.

Around 1.3 billion tonnes of food, or one third of what is produced for human consumption, gets lost or wasted every year, according to the United Nations' food agency, and some estimates are even as high as 50 percent.

In the industrialised world the majority of waste is by consumers, often because they buy too much and have to throw away what they do not manage to eat.

A U.N.-backed study released on the same day said simple measures such as better storage and reducing over-sized portions would sharply reduce the vast amount of food going to waste.

The Holy Father said that the “culture of waste” was especially deplorable given the prevalence of hunger in the world. According to the United Nations hunger affects some 870 million people, while 2 billion suffer from at least one nutritional deficiency, and that not only in the Third World. We have serious hunger at our very own doorsteps
The Argentinian-born pontiff warned that too much focus on money and materialism meant financial market dips were viewed as tragedies while human suffering had become normal and ignored. And that in this way people are discarded as if they were garbage.

Since taking office Pope Francis has made great efforts to get the Roman Catholic Church to defend the poor and to practice greater austerity itself. He, himself, has decided on a much more austere lifestyle than all of his predecessors and has also made several calls for global financial reform.

We are in a culture today that could well be described, as the Pope did, as a culture of waste and it is an absolute throwaway society in almost all regards despite all the recycling claims and supposed efforts.

We don't need to recycle more; we need to consume less, make do with what we have and reuse things on all levels.

As far as food waste is concerned it is true that much is wasted by household in the developed world where people buy too much stuff and then throw food that is going rotten away. At the same time they do not know what to do with leftovers either, as many people today, in the modern developed world appear to be unable to cook properly.

On the other hand much of the food waste occurs between field and store and in the stores too. In the first instance it is food that is being rejected by the buyers because of shape, size, etc., and in the second instance stores throw out perfectly good food because of blemishes and such like.

In the days of old a greengrocers would be allowed to give such fruit and vegetables that he could not sell at the end of the day away to needy folks but the litigation culture put an end to that too, as did other laws.

Through our culture of waste we steal not just food from the poor, so to speak, but we steal from the Planet also, and that too is a tragedy.

© 2013

Hopes for an ecological Church raised by new Pope's choice of name

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The choice of the name Francis, in honor of the Catholic Church’s patron saint of animals and the environment, by Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio upon becoming 266th and current Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, elected on 13 March 2013, has awakened the hopes of ecologists and others who are concerned about rampant consumerism and the deterioration of the Planet that the Church will become more environmentally conscious.

In 1979, then Pope John Paul II proclaimed St. Francis of Assisi (1181/1182-1226) the patron saint of ecologists. In his first mass as Pope, on March 19, 2013 Pope Francis I said: “Let us be protectors of creation, protectors of God’s plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment.”

With the Church’s ability to reach people, the fact that the environment is part of the Pope's discourse is very important, because it will get more people involved.

In Latin America and Africa, environmental problems are closely linked to poverty, with the poor living in areas that are the most vulnerable to climate change and the degradation of the soil,” he said and in other areas too the Pope could possibly turn out to be an ally such as excessive consumption, which is verging on squander and has a huge impact on natural resources.

Environmentalists and bishops in Latin America both criticize consumerism and urge people to follow a simpler lifestyle and the Pope’s homily was in line with the recommendations set forth in the final document of the 5th General Conference of the Council of Latin American Bishops in Aparecido, Brazil, in 2007.

With the Pope hopefully leading the Catholic Church in a new way, and his decision not to live in the Papal apartments in the Vatican but to reside in the Vatican guesthouse also seems to point to a new broom intend on doing some serious housecleaning in the HQ of the Roman Catholic Church, great steps might be taken as to reducing man's impact on the environment.

The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating and we will have to wait as to how things are going to pan out and how far Pope Francis I actually will be allowed to go with this by the Curia and Vatican insiders.

We can but wish Pope Francis I good luck in his endeavors too make the Church a poor Church and a Church for the poor that also takes the environment and protecting of the environment to heart in the way of Saint Francis.

© 2013