Losing respect for our food.

British consumers were put out in February this year when supermarkets temporarily began rationing lettuce and zucchini after flash flooding and snow wiped out crops in Spain.

One crisis such as Cyclone Debbie
is sufficient to empty our
supermarket shelves.

It was a minor inconvenience but one which should fill us with unease. Such breakdowns in the food supply may be a harbinger of things to come and should be shaking the rich world out of its complacency when it comes to food.

A staggering 30 per cent of global food production is wasted, much of it in the well-fed Western world. Yet rising populations and shifting preferences towards more meat consumption internationally, mean farmers need to virtually double food calorie production from 2005 levels if we are to feed the world come 2050.

Read the Pursuit piece by the University of Melbourne’s Professor Timothy Reeves - “Losing respect for our food.”

(Our attitude to wood is clearly wasteful and remarkably casual until we sense there may be a shortage - that was clearly evident post Cyclone Debbie when a niece who lives in Brisbane went to her local supermarket to buy some food and at almost entirely all gone, the shelves were near empty. It appears we have little or no personal or community sense of rationing food - Robert McLean)