The Mentality of Wastefulness

I admit I have an ironic (for an American) pet peeve, wastefulness.
I also admit that in some respects I am not the most efficient individual (mostly in terms of energy consumption [though I am pretty frugal for an American] and food [mainly its packaging]) but there are some pretty basic things that get to me especially in these desperately poor developing countries.
Our janitor (who has now been promoted to janitor and cook), before used to collect all the uneaten food at our organization and take it home to his family and he would talk about how wasteful it was to throw the food away (saving leftovers is a somewhat foreign concept here). Since his promotion I now see him regularly throwing food away, and he has ceased saving the cans to sell to a recycling center, presumably because he has more money now. This is something that is just unfathomable to me, we could easily find one or two beggars around the corner and take the food to them (and I am sure they would be willing to come to us) but instead it gets thrown away. One of the more sobering things I have seen recently was a few kids huddled around a pile of trash making a small pile of inedible looking potatoes. Apparently they were picking out these rotten and bug infested potatoes to take home (hopefully for their livestock but most likely not) and my organization (a "humanitarian organization") throws away its leftover food.
I see this mentality among the "richer" people in developing countries all the time, their absolute repulsion at the idea of taking uneaten food home in carton (like after eating at a restaurant) or their unwillingness to save leftovers after a meal at home for the next day. It has made me sick in the past and still does make me queasy to see children picking through a garbage pile for bits of food and then see perfectly good food being thrown out.

Cheap food...

Being somewhat of a traveler, a wanabe connoisseur, and an aggie I am constantly looking at food comparing prices (among other things). One of my favorite things about Bangkok was the phenomenal food and the dirt cheap prices but the more I travel the more Thai food prices seem like an anomaly.

I heard somewhere that food prices in the US are some of the cheapest (per capita) prices in the world considering the efficiency of large scale farming I am not surprised (you can argue about sustainability, health, morals etc but it is dirt cheap compared to US incomes). I walk around and see prices in developing countries and compare them to the incomes there and I wince almost every time.

A co-worker of mine once mentioned that Afghan’s don’t save money very well, I have seen other cultures that save comparatively well but still, one needs food, and while local food is almost always cheaper it is still not “cheap” for locals, not compared to the US.

In the US and to a greater extend in Europe food is important, and good food is worth paying for but the ability to pay for it is a luxury so it tears me between efficiency and giving people the opportunities to spend less than 1/2-3/4ths of their income one food alone and the grassroots farming I always hear about in the west (support you local farmer etc [which I happen to agree with in the west but only because we can afford to make such choices]) which quite often is not able to provide people with as much food for a cheaper price compared to “factory farming”. Factory farming is improving but in baby steps (especially in the US) like Smithfield (huge pork producer) starting to let sows roam when not farrowing (before they were kept in cages small enough that they could not turn around; which is still standard practice for most large scale pork production).

Adjusting...

Well there is an adjustment curve for every new country I visit (and it seems to get easier every time). One of the things I ran into in Afghanistan is the love of tea, which I share, but they like it the Limey/Yank (Yank = Americans from the north) way, hot. Being from the Southeastern US I often crave sweet iced tea which seems to be a culinary anomaly found just in the SE US (I have found many other places that serve sweet hot tea but not sweet cold tea). Another thing I have noticed is that most teas around the world are pretty damn bitter, à la earl grey. In the US (and perhaps the rest of the world though it seems rare) we have a few brands (varieties?) that are not bitter and also caffeine free (caffeine is fine but it only takes alittle to keep me up into the wee hours of the morning).

So, here I have taken on a combination of tea drinking preparations to come up with my own tea here. Mainly chilling the tea (southeast US), adding Sugar (many different places), and adding milk (ok, in my case soy milk but its the adding of a protein that is the key here, its an Britain/Indian thing [I never have figured out if the Limeys got it from the Indians or the other way around]) to take away the bitterness.

Side note: I was a miserable chemistry student (even though I did pretty well even in the higher levels of collegiate biology) but one of the few things I took away from Chemistry 101 was how milk (more specifically protein) neutralizes the bitterness in tea (for more details on that try here or here) so when drinking bitter tea I thank Chemistry 101, and of course the Indians/Brits.