Around the world

How to save on food and save the planet

It has been found that too much food is being thrown away in Britain now, reports the BBC newsletter, so much so it is being recommended that Britons should go back to the days of the of the last war when they did without so many things without grumbling.

Left over food was not thrown away then, but re-used adding a new taste to the preparation. If this is done now Britons will not only save their money but also help save the planet.

The food that Britain wastes now amounts to over six million tons a year. The food that is thrown away goes to land fills. What happens then is that the decaying food starts releasing methane which in turn harms our environment. What is being suggested is that Britons must not be too ready to throw away food but learn the art of using leftovers.

But it is these lost skills, says the BBC, that are to blame for much of the 6.7 million tonnes of food we throw away each year.

“A third of all the food we buy is now thrown into the bin and half of it is still perfectly edible, according to the Government’s waste reduction agency; WRAP. You’re throwing away one bag of shopping in three.”

WRAP also points out that the current wanton waste if eliminated it would be like, environmentally speaking, removing a fifth of the traffic now on Britains’s roads. All in all what WRAP is urging is that a return to wartime values of thrift and resourcefulness is now needed.

Here in our country thrift and resourcefulness is a daily habit of the Sri Lankan housewife. Leftovers are seldom thrown away In fact one dish is called hath maaluva made up of seven different kinds of vegetables either fresh or leftovers.

And even the bajiri eating that took place in this country in one of its troubled times and people had to stand in queues, the necessity for it was understood by our people. It’s the politicians who in their politickings tried to rouse up the people on the bajiri eating and the poaling yugaya.

An amazing escape

A pregnant Indian woman in her early Thirties while travelling in a train in the Rajasthan state went to the toilet. There she felt faint and recovered soon enough only to find that the baby she carried had slipped out and fallen in to the chute of the toilet bowl and right into the stony track below. She quickly got back to her relatives she was travelling with and told them of her plight.

Quickly the train was brought to a halt and the officials ran to the spot which took them nearly one and a half hours to reach.

The baby, premature by two months was found on the pebbles of the track with the umbilical cord, which had got yanked off in the fall, by her side. She was alive but had become blue due to the cold blowing. A doctor in the hospital said they do not expect such babies to survive.

However, another pediatrician is reported to have told the Times of India that “almost twelve hours after the accident she was coming out of the accident quite well. She is a fighter.”

In hospital the mother told reporters that she fainted after the birth. “I did not even realise that my child had slipped from the hole in the toilet and onto the railway track.”

The BBC while commenting on the incident noted that Indian toilets are unhygienic. Now this may be true, but who first designed the railway toilets, the carriages and the railway engines.

They were all manufactured by Great Britain and exported to India and Ceylon where a hole in the toilet carried the effluent away and down to the stony track below. They were probably the same kind used in Britain in the early days of the railway before hygiene and sanitation came into their own in Britain.

A man of many degrees

Meet a man who has earned 74 university degrees and is still panting for more. He is Sudhakar and hails from Andhra Pradesh. Born to illiterate parents who were landless labourers, at one time he washed cups and plates at a roadside eatery and obtained a formal education through distance learning programs. He says that his mother urged him on by saying “the most impossible dreams can be realised.”

He never failed to be guided by Ambedkar, who was the leader of an Indian minority community known as the Dalits and who also wrote the Indian Constitution.

He admits that he also read the works of American writers like Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill who pointed the way to lead a successful life. He also passed on this information to his two sisters and a brother and financed them to obtain their Masters and doctrate degrees.

In addition to securing so many degrees, Sudhakar also joined the Indian Information Service and became a PRO for India’s Defence Ministry and also worked in the AIR.

He is also the author of several books. The subjects he studied for his degrees are quite a variety. He did constitutional law, psychology, the media, music and theatre.

The most recent honour he received is a doctorate from he University of Italy. He has not stopped researching into more areas of knowledge and hopes he can achieve the impossible dream of achieving a 100 degrees.

- Roving Eye