First I want to tell you, I don’t buy a lot of processed and packaged foods. I don’t intentionally throw away a lot of things. I use things a long time, and repair them if I can, and then try to repurpose them, and finally try to recycle them if possible. I try not to need a lot in the first place. I’d rather buy nothing than something made without regard to its environmental effects. I tend to eat nothing when there is no food available up to my standards. I’m certainly not in favor of trashing our beautiful planet with litter or toxic waste.
But. This idea can go too far. We need to also spill some over. Relax a little. Our tightly wired industrial society has given us unnatural compulsions, strange guilty ways of moving through daily life. Efficiency is paramount. Roofs should not overhang too far, because it’s thought to be too expensive to build a generous and secure feeling space. Clothing should be form fitting, budgets tight. Just in time delivery for your factory.
Some people I know who were raised by parents who grew up in the Great Depression or who themselves grew up with not enough, have twisted habits and judgemental thinking that they foist upon those around them. Cheaper is always seen as virtuous and superior. And to seemingly waste anything is not just a loss, but somehow it is morally wrong.
It’s as if you lose points, or money in the future, that will logically add up in some imagined scoreboard of your life, that will you doom you to an old age of want and poverty, or cause a child to die of hunger in Africa, if you don’t eat all of the food on your plate. This is self perpetuating scarcity, reinforced with our powerful minds. My dear friend said she could not live anymore because the money in her savings account was almost gone. As she wished, she soon died!
And our powerful minds are the real problem, as well as the solution. I have watched quietly as those around me demand the uneaten food on my plate, which I had intended to share with my dog. These people easily can go get some food themselves but my dog can’t. They are not preventing waste, they are actually stealing food from my dog, who of course, is a person too.
They may think they are cleverly saving money by getting a scrap of food they don’t have to buy with money, but instead, they are they are paying a great price by buying into money scarcity thinking. But usually this line of thought leads instead to overconsumption by the mechanism of overeating, the idea being that if they stuff themselves now, with free available food, even when it is not needed, even if it is not very good, they won’t have to spend money later, thus, they will have money. Later.
I have watched in astonishment as people fish out orange rinds as I throw them in the compost, so as to maybe squeeze out a few drops of juice because they think I must be juicing them too fast and missing something. Or pieces of fruit I have cut, leaving some perceived edible bit still on them. These are strong, capable people who can easily acquire fruit for themselves but who will only allot themselves this privilege if they can get it without money.
“Fruit is an opportunity, not an obligation “- David Sunheart
Some people have convinced themselves that they can’t afford to eat fruit, it’s too expensive. They believe they can only afford factory made “food products” in boxes with printed numbers that say numbers related to their pieces of paper or man made metal disk piles, which are not even pieces of paper, but computer flashes, telling them what they are allowed to eat. Someone convinced them that money doesn’t grow on trees, but I assure you, fruit most certainly does. Somehow it has come to that.
I’ve seen much creative time and energy go into projects and pursuits of making things with stuff that “would otherwise be thrown away.” This is the root of the problem that later appears as scarcity. Why not front load this process? Why not question an industrial mindset that relentlessly chews up nature and spews out piles of unwanted stuff? We need to design gentle, abundant, “cradle to cradle” systems, of sustainability. Such as the tree.
I once asked a friend who had lived in a poor country why they did not compost their food scraps so they could have abundant gardens, as we do. Their response really opened my eyes. They do not have piles of food scraps. Everything is eaten by someone, people or animals. This is what real scarcity looks like. There is no waste at all, no slack in the system, no room for natural disruptions, not enough extra to cushion the bumps. Yet that same poor country also has a wealthy class that has pushed the poor to this point by over harvesting the natural resources all around them. This is where our maximum efficiency thinking is leading.
Actually, eating more than you need at the moment leads to wanting too much later, thus using, thus wasting more later as well. We have to change that thinking. It is having the reverse effect. The way to do this is to bless this food and be grateful that we do have enough now. If we can’t finish what is on our plate, we can take note of that and maybe next time, put less food on it.
Or share it with someone around us, but not with a projected attitude of needing to use it up to avoid waste, just to share the pleasure. Also, the dog might enjoy it. And if you compost, perhaps you can contribute to the well being and nourishment of next years tomatoes.
You are not a human trash can. You do not need to dig around in the refuse bin to survive, and you don’t deserve to only eat the funky parts. And you are not helping unwind a messed up system by being a garbage eater.
Buying or going out and picking fruit to eat and share is an act of love and prosperity. You are supporting the farmer, or thanking the tree for its abundance. Most fruit trees drop far more fruit than anyone can eat. Most plants make far more seeds than they need to have sprout and grow around them. The tree does not regret that some of its fruit rots on the ground.
It is unnatural and frankly, it is rude to use up every little bit, unless you truly are starving. It says to you and those around you, there’s not enough for us.
Nature teaches us to spill some over. Let some fall to the ground, some blow in the wind, some be planted, some be eaten. Nature doesn’t think of it as waste. In nature, garbage is food, because some creature finds the waste of other creatures useful, as is not the case with the toxic waste the humans make. Nature allows things to spread out. You are in harmony with the universe if you drop some, spill some, forget some, share some, and yes, pick out the very best bits for this moment.
I watch the deer graze outside my window. They do not efficiently go along decimating the grass, inch by inch. No. They nibble the freshest points of cool tender grass, and my prettiest purple petunias of the day, and wander on, because that is the most delightful thing of the moment. They are not thinking, I’ll use up this half rotted plant now so it won’t spoil and I’ll save money for later in my food budget.
In this abundant world today it is also good to go without sometimes, knowing that when we have a need, someone will help us. Give us this day our daily bread. Just as mindfully going a little hungry every day, refraining from overeating, brings flavor and pleasure to the next meal. It is an act of faith. It’s an act of tantra yoga, which is to say, restraint. We learn that we actually didn’t need so much as maybe we thought.
Yes, it is true that in the aggregate, the humans on the planet today are wasting something like a fourth of the stuff that they call “food”, a nontrivial fact. But the way it gets to the stage of being called food is the problem, the way we think of it, the way we make it, grow it, package it, distribute it, and share or don’t share it. The same goes for our other needs and items we consume. Scarcity thinking is what leads to the very behaviors that create actual scarcity. This is the real waste, the waste of our beautiful creative and powerful mental energy and time on holding on to such petty, meager, and small minded erroneous concepts.
Instead, I wonder what beautiful things we could create with our time and energy.
“It is better to do nothing than to waste time.” -Victoras Kulvinskas
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