India’s obsession with wasting food

Remember the various perplexing rules we grew up on? One was, “Don’t waste your food, there are children starving in Kalahandi!” It was never quite clear how your chomping on chicken would help the starving kids in Kalahandi. Where on earth was Kalahandi anyway? Near Ethiopia, perhaps? The people in these curious places were not like us. They ate strange roots and shoots and leaves and had thin, snot-nosed, grimy children with pot-bellies.
Now we are all grown up, but our attitude towards the poverty-stricken of our country has not changed. What has changed is our understanding of reality. We now know that wasting food is okay. We let several million tonnes of foodgrains rot while people around the country starve. Including the children of Kalahandi, freshly released from the clutches of Vedanta — thin, snot-nosed, grimy, pot-bellied, the children of neverneverland.
And when the Supreme Court instructs our government to let the poor have the food that is being wasted, we say what we say best: Not possible. The SC had to rap our government on the knuckles before it agreed to release some of its rotting food for its starving citizens. But it won’t be for free, as ordered by the court, the poor would have to buy it. Also, it won’t be the entire amount that is rotting, but a piffling part thereof. The rest can remain out in the open, under tarpaulins in the rain — as it has for several monsoons now.
Our alarming obsession with wasting foodgrains while millions go hungry has very little to do with food security. The food you cannot use — because it is rotten and because you admit that you cannot distribute it as ordered by the court — is unlikely to secure the country in times of need. Yet we hear the food security argument being bandied about, just as we hear about the great uses of the PDS — the disastrously dysfunctional public di­s­tribution system.
Look at it this way. You buy food at home, stock your fridge and pantry cabinets and feel secure for the rainy day. Then you buy some more food, and put it out on the balcony since there is nowhere else you can stack it. And some more. Then some more of the same. Meanwhile your family has changed, some members have lost their jobs, some are sick, there are more children. But you refuse to let them have even the food that’s rotting in the balcony. The depths of your fridge are full of fungus-flavoured mysterious foodstuff in various containers. You refuse to recognise them as non-food.
Then your mother comes along and yells at you for wasting food. Give it to the needy, she says — give it to the hungry at home, ev­en if they didn’t buy it. You have responsibilities in a family, she says. Not possible, you say. I wo­uld have to get plates for them all — distribution is a problem. Your mother pulls herself up to her full five foot two inches and says in Th­at Terrible Tone of Voice, “I didn’t ask your opinion. Just do it!”
So you scurry about in the balcony rifling through the rotting food, armed with busted crockery in which you plan to distribute the grub. You take just one bag of foodstuff, and leave the rest. Then you lay out the stale grub and tell your hungry family, “Okay, I will charge you much less than the market rate…”
You would probably not be at the helm of the household for long. You would probably be put away in a safe place where you couldn’t harm yourself or others. So why do we accept it as normal when the government does on a grand scale what we would never accept at home? Governance is not that different from good housekeeping. We must recognise lunacy when we see it.
So lets get some things straight, First, more is not always better. Yes, you must keep some food in stock for security and to control prices. Around 25 million tonnes would probably be fine for that. More would be unnecessary, especially if no one gets to eat it. Millions of tonnes of foodgrains are wasted simply because we buy more than we can stock. And in a country reeling with starvations deaths and endemic hunger, that is criminal.
We have been storing about 59 million tonnes of grain, way more than double the amount we need. If the bags of grain were lined up they would stretch over a million kilometres, enough to reach the moon and back, as one economist had put it a decade ago.
And apparently, we have proper storage facilities for only 31 million tonnes. That’s just over half of what we buy. The remaining 28 million tonnes of grain is left under tarpaulins in the open — monsoon after monsoon. Of course it would rot. And you and I pay for this exercise in absurdity. Maintaining massive food stocks costs big money — even if it is never used.
The SC’s order pointed out the absurdity of wasting food when people are starving. It also pushed the government into getting correct figures on people living below poverty line. And today it seems that the PDS is finally going to be overhauled.
But the government needs to realise that the poor cannot be chopped into convenient family size units, with one-size-fits-all entitlements. The set 35 kg of rice and wheat per month may be fine for a small family, but would leave bigger families hugely undernourished. We need to look at individuals. At each citizen. And we need to look at under-nourishment in general — especially protein-energy malnutrition that we are severely affected by. The government doesn’t seem to recognise that for proper nutrition one needs pulses and oil, too. Man doesn’t live on rice and wheat alone.
There is much to be done while we wait for the Right to Food. Hopefully we won’t have to go through the Supreme Court every time.

n Antara Dev Sen is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at sen@littlemag.com [2]