Must We Be So Wasteful?
November 24th, 2009 | Published in Opinion
It’s been a while but I have been watching the Food Network again. The Next Iron Chef seemed to reel us in the past few nights and it is definitely entertaining. There’s no way that I could possible come up with some of these dishes – not that they are all winners. There are truly some bad decisions made by the competing chefs. But I digress.
I was watching a re-run of the finale of The Next Iron Chef. As Chef Mehta and Chef Garces duke out Battle Rack/Ribs something became frightening clear. This is one of the most wasteful shows on television. No, I’m not talking about your brain cells here. I am talking about the loads of food that ends up in the trash. They must be tearing through over 150 pounds of beef, pork, buffalo, and other unidentifiable primal cuts of mammals.
This is not the first time I’ve thought about this issue. With the dozens of episodes of Iron Chef proper that I’ve seen in the past this has come to mind many times. There are many other shows that are just as guilty of being absurdly wasteful. One that comes to mind that might even beat Iron Chef is the Travel Channel’s Man v. Food.
The premise behind Man v. Food is that Adam, the host, travels throughout the country to find regional favorites from cinnamon rolls to oysters. It sounds simple enough but where does he battle the food? It’s simple. Adam seeks out restaurants that have that one item that no one ever orders. Ever. “Eat a 72 Ounce Steak and it’s FREE”. “Eat 15 Dozen Oysters and it’s FREE!” Sure, these are items that are on the menu. Sure, there is a wall of ‘legends’ that have actually succeeded in conquering said food. But is this necessary?
No. We have eating competitions across the country – complete with qualifying rounds. Chili. Hot dogs. Pie. Ribs. There’s even International Federation of Competitive Eating. And we wonder why we’re a nation of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and high cholesterol.
The numbers are all over the place but somewhere between 700 and 4,000 people die in the world every hour. One in twelve people are malnourished in the world. If you want to really dive into the stats you can see what the Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has to say.
I’m not saying that you should not enjoy Thanksgiving this Thursday or indulging in some cheesecake on any given Tuesday. But I do say that you should not waste food. Any of it. Ever.