Pie in the Sky!

When I was growing up and we kids did not want to eat our vegetables, my mom, like many moms around the world, would say, "There are children in Ethiopia who have never even seen a vegetable." And when we didn't want to eat the last morsels on our plates, she would rebuke us with, "A Palestinian child would give so much to have just those few bites."

Unlike many people, however, my mother didn't just feed us spoonfuls of guilt and leave it there.

No, on the days when we kids resisted and the leftovers were plenty, she would pack up the extra food in containers and walk to the end of the street, share a nicety or two with the security guard and hand him the containers. Often extra food, especially cookies and cakes, was wrapped up for the gardener, who had a sweet tooth, or for the housekeeper, to take to the tiny church bazaar that she ran on Sundays. And then there were times when my mom would bundle us kids into the back of the car and drive us to the nearby orphanage, where the food would be shared with the kids who lived there.

As a result, my mom's plea for the hungry of the world was never pie in the sky; it was pie to be shared with all who needed feeding around her.

I was reminded of these memories because recently I started taking a cooking class- "Essentials of Fine Cooking," where I learned how to make mayonnaise from scratch, a bouillabaisse that my husband relished, and a scrumptious ratatouille (the dish served by the rat in the Pixar movie).

But while creating all these fancy dishes, I could not help but notice the amount of food that was being wasted. Heaps of vegetables, meat, fish and poultry, cooked and uncooked, were being tossed into rubbish bins. To their credit the chefs at the school do utilize all parts of animals and vegetables- often in stocks, compounds and sauces- but the sheer volume of the food often exceeds the consumption.

This is a problem that affects many cooking schools, restaurants, and the larger food industry. Just the other day, a friend and I were having a late night coffee at a popular French bakery in my neighbourhood. At closing time, we watched in horror as loaves of breads and pastries not sold for the day were swept away into big black rubbish bins, along with the dust and dirt.

What happened to the sharing of leftovers or handing it over to people who have need for it?

Surely these establishments can make arrangements to ensure their leftovers feed some of the hungry in New York. There are many soup kitchens all over the city, which would welcome their contributions. As would the many organizations established for the sole purpose of collecting and redistributing food to the hungry of New York.

One such organization is City Harvest, whose mission is to rescue food for New York's hungry. In addition to dining establishments, the organization rescues food from farmers and other food producers who find their supply outweighing their demand. The excess is collected and packaged by volunteers from the community and redistributed to those in need.

The wastage of food in New York started me thinking about the hungry across the world- their right to food and how they can be fed in a sustainable manner?

The "right to food" is a human right objective, agreed to by all Heads of State during the World Food Summit in 1996, where they asserted that, "It is the right of everyone to have access to safe and nutritious food, and a right of everyone to be free from hunger."

To ensure that this happens, there are numerous United Nations programmes and agencies- such as the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP)- that work towards eradicating hunger and malnutrition and to ending the need for food aid itself. They do this by developing programmes that help with environmental and economic stability and agricultural production.

There are also ongoing discussions between academics, diplomats and governments, which offer up all kinds of solutions to world hunger. The solutions range from how to best assist continents like Africa with financial and technical support, to the elimination of agricultural subsidies, and the implementation of a rules-based international trading system for food and agricultural commodities.

All of these efforts are an indispensable part of a long-term solution to world hunger.

But what can be done at the individual level? Why should world hunger be pie in the sky for most of us, a subject to be discussed at dinner parties? A problem that "others" will work to eradicate?

There is much that can be done. We can give financial contributions to the various organizations that work towards curbing hunger and even volunteer our time, all of which is commendable.

But there is also something else that each of us can do- something that is not hard, time consuming or inconvenient.

We can become more conscious of the amount of food that we waste, and we can try to redistribute our leftover food to the less fortunate people, or to organizations and community groups established for this purpose.

In this manner, the pie in the sky comes down to earth....on someone's dinner table.