In many cultures, not least in the Arab world with its strong belief in generous hospitality, the provision of food is an important part of the welcome. Even when a family might have little food to spare, the guest is often given the surplus.
Fortunately, here in the Kingdom we now live in times of plenty. Indeed, given the worrying rise in obesity and the conditions, such as diabetes and cardiac disease, which are associated with being overweight, that plenty is all-too-often too much. However, the problem is far bigger than simply overeating. We are also over-buying and preparing far more food than we can eat, with the result that significant quantities are thrown away.
When it comes to the over-consumption of food, the Americans are world leaders. Diners serve massive portions, fast food restaurants sell millions of super-size meals washed down with liters of sugary colas, supermarket shelves are stacked with jumbo packages of meats and other foods groaning with carbohydrates. Yet despite gargantuan US appetites, by no means all of this food is consumed. Indeed in 2010, Americans wasted 33.79 million tons of food, which someone calculated, bizarrely, was sufficient to fill the Empire State building 91 times. The average American throws away up to 115 kilograms of food every year. These extraordinary figures represented an increase of 16 percent in waste from the year 2000, even given the rising US obsession for healthy living and regular exercise.
Yet this scandal does not simply embrace the United States. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) has worked out that the amount of food wasted by consumers in industrialized countries is almost as much as the entire food production of sub-Saharan Africa.
Nor is this the end of the problem. The world produces around four billion metric tons of food a year. Yet because of poor harvesting, careless storage and inefficient transport, at least 1.2 billion tons of this produce, and by some estimates fully half of it, never reaches the table. The best that might happen to it is that, rated as unfit for human consumption, it ends up being used to feed livestock.
Given that the world could be having to feed an extra billion mouths by the end of the century, and that already there are millions of unfortunates who cannot be sure where their next meal is coming from, these stark statistics ought to be a cause for the most major concern.
Here in the Kingdom, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah has ordered that the whole issue of food wastage, from the field to the table, should be examined as a matter of urgency. The Ministry of Agriculture has set up a panel of experts that is looking at the food supply network to see where and how food wastage can be curbed.
The minister, Dr. Fahd Balghunaim has pointed out that failures in the food supply chain not only impose extra costs for the consumer but also cause problems in terms of disposal. If waste has to occur, then it is important that wherever possible, it can be turned to advantage. It can be recycled either as food for animals or for use in organic power generation.
On the face of it, sorting out failures in the food supply chain may be easier than the other part of the ministry’s brief. The king has also ordered that there be a campaign to drive home the need to stop wasting food, not simply in the family, but in restaurants, hotels, schools, and universities.
This will be a hard call. Certainly in hotels and restaurants, waste is almost unavoidable. Even when much of an order is cooked from fresh, part of the ingredients will have been prepared beforehand. Some of the food that is left over is given to the staff or is recycled into different dishes for the following day, but waste seems inevitable.
It is however, perfectly possible for families to cut out wasteful overbuying and over-cooking. There is no longer the excuse that friends or other guests may drop in and there will not be enough food to offer them. With freezers and microwaves in virtually every Saudi home these days, extra food can be prepared in minutes.
This is not simply about caring for our weight and our waistlines. It is also about behaving responsibly when we are surrounded by the sort of plenty that millions of the hungry elsewhere in the world could only ever dream of.
Need to check wastage of food
Need to check wastage of food
Editorial: Iran must not go unpunished
- Arab News argues that while war is always a last resort, an international response is a must to curb Iranian meddling
- US strikes worked well when Assad used chemical weapons against his people
The attacks on Tuesday by armed drones on Saudi oil-pumping stations, and two days beforehand on oil tankers off the coast of Fujairah in the UAE, represent a serious escalation on the part of Iran and its proxies, should the initial conclusions of an international investigation prove to be accurate.
Riyadh has constantly warned world leaders of the dangers that Iran poses, not only to Saudi Arabia and the region, but also to the entire world. This is something former President Obama did not realize until the Iran-backed Houthis attacked the US Navy three times in late 2016. The recent attacks on oil tankers and oil pipelines were aimed at subverting the world economy by hitting directly at the lifeline of today’s world of commerce. Tehran should not get away with any more intimidation, or be allowed to threaten global stability.
It was in 2008 that the late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz called upon the US to “cut off the head of the snake,” in reference to the malign activities of Iran. Nearly a decade later, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman referred to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as the “new Hitler of the Middle East.” We are in 2019 and Iran continues to wreak havoc in the region, both directly and through its well armed proxies. Crown Prince Mohammed was therefore clearly correct when he argued that appeasement does not work with the Iranian regime, just as it did not work with Hitler. The next logical step — in this newspaper’s view — should be surgical strikes. The US has set a precedent, and it had a telling effect: The Trump strikes on Syria when the Assad regime used Sarin gas against its people.
We argue this because it is clear that sanctions are not sending the right message. If the Iranian regime were not too used to getting away with their crimes, they would have taken up the offer from President Trump to get on the phone and call him in order to reach a deal that would be in the best interests of the Iranian people themselves. As the two recent attacks indicate, the Iranians insist on disrupting the flow of energy around the world, putting the lives of babies in incubators at risk, threatening hospitals and airports, attacking civilian ships and putting innocent lives in danger. As the case always is with the Iranian leadership, they bury their heads in the sand and pretend that they have done nothing. Nevertheless, investigations indicate that they were behind the attack on our brothers in the UAE while their Houthi militias targeted the Saudi pipelines.
Our point of view is that they must be hit hard. They need to be shown that the circumstances are now different. We call for a decisive, punitive reaction to what happened so that Iran knows that every single move they make will have consequences. The time has come for Iran not only to curb its nuclear weapon ambitions — again in the world’s interest — but also for the world to ensure that they do not have the means to support their terror networks across the region.
We respect the wise and calm approach of politicians and diplomats calling for investigations to be completed and all other options to be exhausted before heading to war. In the considered view of this newspaper, there has to be deterrent and punitive action in order for Iran to know that no sinister act will go unpunished; that action, in our opinion, should be a calculated surgical strike.
