Hitting the Sauce
Food for Thought
If you think that world hunger or any kind of food security issue is about our inability to produce or grow enough food, you might change your mind if you take a casual look at any grocery store’s condiment aisle, for example, and then multiply what you see by every grocery store in your town (and/or, the world). Think of what each of them are made of: You’ll find (among other things); ketchup/tomatoes, mayo/eggs, mustard/mustard seed (which takes a lot of land), and of course pickles & relish/cucumbers.
Then there are all the different kinds of sauces for coating, marinating, dipping, basting, and so on. Salad dressings up the wazoo, and all the pickled or preserved things that aren’t cucumbers. Then you'll notice all of the varieties of vinegars and cooking oils. (Do not get me started on the oils. Just. Don’t.) Think of how much oil one single olive might produce, or how many pressed, tiny seeds it takes to fill a bottle of sesame oil. And most of the “Ethnic” items are off taking up their own space on an aisle somewhere else in the store.
We all love the selection and what they add to our cooking, and some might argue that we NEED some or most of those (I’m not advocating taking away your spicy brown mustard, so worry not), but we could live without most of them and use the ingredients, or the land where they are grown, to feed the world if it were needed. I, for one, feel I need Thai peanut sauce (I mean, who doesn’t?), and my children consider ranch dressing to be a food group, while my brother feels the same about ketchup. But that is not the problem, is it? We already grow/produce enough to feed the world’s 8 billion souls.
So, why do some people still go hungry? The main issues are distribution and access, land use, and food waste (and each of these can be split into several causes of their own). You don’t have to look to me to cite the individual facts of these truths. There are studies from all over that show these to be the causes, people working to solve them, and those that stand in the way.
Even a quick search will tell you that most think-tanks and researchers believe we grow enough each year to feed 10 billion people, which is 2 billion more than currently live on the thin skin of our little home. As usual, it is the people that profit from cultivating and propagating these world problems that keep them healthy and alive, rather than those that need the food.
Yes, there are generalities I could point to, like Big Ag, Big Oil (and most any “Big” that you can think of), plus mega grocery alliances, war and anything else associated with greedy despots.
So, go ahead, buy three kinds of mustard (I feel seen). Keep two opened jars of dill pickles, four kinds of hot sauce, a back-up ketchup, five kinds of salad dressing, and two kinds of fruit spread in the door of your fridge. That isn’t the problem, and no kid in Africa, or around the corner in your hometown, is going to go hungry because of it. But maybe you can find some way to help someone, even just one “someone” get enough to eat today.
But, please, think about these things when you are wandering the aisles of your grocery store, looking for that salsa you love, or the garlic stuffed olives, where the shelves are magically restocked every single day. Ask yourself, “how is it that my favorite kind of snack cracker is always stocked, but we can’t feed some of people down the street?”
Then, PLEASE-OH-PLEASE, take a think on the people, the workers and farmers, literally the “boots-on-the-ground” people that produce this food for you. Turns out, even some of them go hungry. How can that even be a thing?
About the Creator
Joel Lippert
We all just create something out of something else; to create something out of nothing would be truly divine, would it not?
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