STS

Save the Soil. Even mud is precious. Only when living things - even the icky ones - can grow on soil can edible plants come up too!

When an old man told me the role of earth worms in making a soil rich and tillable, I was surprised, remembering the crawly creatures that would come up during rainy days in my ground floor flat in Delhi. The chemical fertilisers not only kill the bad but the good germs and worms too.

When I see the government ad for using only that much fertiliser as is needed, I wonder if there was anyway we could have known this before.

Maybe India is lucky in that many farmers could not afford the fertilisers and so continued to use natural methods. But when you hear of artificial ripeners and vegetables being polished with dyes to make them look fresh, it gets scary. Food, instead of being a source of nutrition and strength, seems to have become a slow poison.

Buying only as much as one needs and ensuring their proper consumption would reduce the pressure on production and therefore on land. Maybe we can still save the soil by allowing land to be fallow.

Cleaning the Plate

Recently while serving at a Grihapravesam (house warming), I was very impressed with two elderly ladies - maybe sisters - who left a very clean leaf behind, not wasting even a single morsel behind.

But, they constituted probably a minority. Leave alone children, even adults are unable to do justice to all that is served on the leaf. The host invariably spends about Rs 80-100 a plate. And orders for at least 10 extra people.

Concerned about the waste of food, I have tried to make sure that I am served only that which I can do justice to.

Recently I saw a forwarded mail about how in Germany, even in hotels, you are not expected to waste food even if you are paying for it. "You are using a common resource and therefore have a responsibility towards it," a social inspector was quoted in that mail.

It is not just about affordability but about drawing from natural resources. One may argue that the food can always be given away to the poor, I am not sure how many of us really manage to do it, and that too, when it is fresh and suitable for consumption.

Just a thought: All our cultures tell us to make enough so that we are not scraping the vessel when serving a guest. But when it is just the family, maybe a bit of caution and disposing it wisely so that other living things can benefit if at all there is extra may help us preserve this resource.