An article in the latest issue of the green party’s official
magazine ‘Green World’ sparked the theme for my first blog post… it read:
“Feeding people has always been important. It will be even
more so with the billions of extra mouths to feed in the coming years. The
truth is, however, that we’re already doing a pretty bad job of it. A billion
people are hungry and another billion are malnourished. At the same time, a
billion people are obese: overweight to the point it is damaging their health.”
Shocking, isn’t it? The articles main point was about how
factory farming was cruel and actually rearing animals as food, is really
inefficient (Did you know, if the grain that was used to feed animals was grown
in a single field, it would be the size if the EU? That’s a lot of extra food
we could be harvesting.. just saying… ). But what I took from the feature, was how crazy it is that we have so many
people living in the extremes of poor health. Divide the food up a bit more
evenly and everyone can be happy right in the middle of the normal
distribution, bell shaped curve! No extremes necessary!
There is so much wealth on this planet: why can’t we spread
it out a bit, then everyone would be happy! Now this is sounding a bit like
some Marxism theory and big up for communism, and I’m not going to go down that
road. But what I would like to say is
that it is very important to be aware of the inequality that surrounds us,
otherwise we can just become complacent. Just look at the amount of people that
walk past the homeless without giving them a second thought. Inequality is
probably more visually shocking in the shanty Towns of somewhere like Brazil...
It’s not a new concept. One of my dad’s old sayings drilled
into my head is ‘everything in moderation my dear!’ (He frequently uses this as
a response to my complaints about being hung-over!) It’s true though: too much
alcohol makes you sick, whereas a glass or too can give an evening a little
lift. Too many burgers make you fat, being too sensible makes you boring, doing
too many weights makes you look like Jodie Marsh, and now I think I’ve got too
many examples to waffle on with…
But anyhow… if you ever get that feeling I sometimes get,
when you see a solo person driving a massive 4x4, wearing an overpriced Pandora
bracelet, chomping on a McDonalds and throwing their rubbish out the window,
and you think “look at you, you outrageously rich person” and you just want to
run over, drag them out the car, shout at them “you are being so immoderate!
Think of all the starving people out there who have to walk miles just to get
some food” and then you place them nicely into an eco-friendly hybrid Honda and
send them on their way, now with some of their ridiculously high income being
donated to the poor, to make things a little bit more equal … then don’t be
afraid, because these feelings are normal.
Sources:
Greenworld GW75 Winter 2012
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