Wasting food

Our children at Holy Cross School are studying Cambodia as part of their religious education "Mission" unit. It's great to see the natural sympathy the kids have for kids who don't have what they have. They naturally sense the injustice and want to help. But their options for helping seem to be limited to the inevitable "let's do a fundraiser". Which means getting other people to give money. I see this premise also in high school kids who are full of good will to raise money for charity, and even better, go on a "mission trip" or immersion experience, but who rarely correlate their own standard of living with an unfair share of the world's resources, of which the object of their concern suffer the lack.

For awhile I've been watching our school do the eco-friendly project of collecting the lunch scraps and feeding them to the chickens. But the quantity of food thrown out has staggered me - 4 or 5 buckets a day, which is far too much for the 8 chickens who peck through their favourite sandwiches (ham seems popular, vegemite less so) before turning up their beaks to the remainder and leaving it for the ducks, rosellas, scrub turkeys and rats.

This week I visited years 3 and 4 to confront them with the amount of waste they generate. By preparing them by getting them to recount what they know of Cambodia and their desire to help, they were genuinely shocked to look through the waste and find the whole apples and untouched sandwiches, some still in their bags. We discussed eating all our lunch and not wasting food both to be in solidarity with the children of Cambodia who would never throw out good food, and to lessen our overall consumption by eating less after school snacks in lieu of the lunches we didn't eat.

I wonder if  it will make any difference.