Water and Food (Part 1)

Firstly, two suggestions for conserving water; Jenanne Redman - in running the tap to get the water sufficiently cold one can collect the initial flow and use for watering indoor plants and the garden. Jenanne also points out that some houses built in the 1960-70s did not have gutters installed making it impossible to collect rain waters. She points out the desirability to have gutters on all future house building.

And Mary Grady, for a one person household, has a water meter, which together with three water butts (aka old dustbins) for watering the garden, has reduced her water bills by around 50%.

A major use of water is to irrigate crops. In the alleged place of Jesus's baptism in the river Jordon the water is now a health hazard for any such practice, let alone to drink. This is due to 80-90% of the water being diverted to irrigate crops in Israel combined with the run off from pesticides and chemical fertilizers now used in much of our food production.

This industrialization of agriculture, together with the practice of transporting foodstuffs all over the world has undoubtedly led to the huge variety of foods on offer in our supermarkets. However the social cost in terms of forcing down wages and the environmental cost in terms of deforestation, depletion of fish stocks by over 70% are leading to a situation that will become unsustainable.

Moreover as Tristram Hunt demonstrates in his book WASTE, 50% of all food consumed or produced in the so called developed world ends up being discarded. This is through over production in the first place, supermarket policies of rejecting products on grounds of appearance, not on grounds of quality (and cavalier treatment of producers in cancelling crops at the last minute) overstocking, using unrealistic sale by dates, and encouraging excess purchasing and, finally, around a third of all food bought being thrown away and risking ending up in landfill. Tristram Hunt also estimates that this 50% could feed the malnourished children and adults of the world THREE TIMES OVER. One can hear the thundering scorn of the Old Testament prophets (whose voices were to be brought to fulfilment in the supreme prophet of the New Testament) over the fate of this modern day Lazarus dying at the gate of the indifferent, over-consuming, profligate, self-obsessed Westerner.

How did we get to this state of affairs over our use (and misuse) of food? It was not always so. During the World War 2 there was a combination of growing much of our own food through sustainable mixed farming and strict rationing that ensured rich and poor all received an adequate diet. When we gladly threw off this imposed austerity we began the journey to the present situation of relying on a handful of mega corporations to provide and control the bulk of our food.

Supermarkets have come into the picture relatively late in the 1970-80s but are now the main purveyors of food from these mega corporations. In addition they have now succeeded in killing off much of our local High Streets with all the social costs of impoverishing our local communities.

My personal response is to avoid using supermarkets if possible. In using them one should be increasingly aware of the social and environmental cost of the cheap food on offer. One myth supermarkets promote is our entitlement to 'cheap' food. We now spend only a fraction of our disposable income on food.

Jill Vogler