A Lack Of Balance

Found myself thinking about food today - not so much in terms of obsessing about what I wanted to eat, but with regard to our collective relationship with the stuff. My thoughts were partly prompted by having read somewhere that the rate of obesity in the US is now around 40% for the adult population. This struck me as both horrifying yet entirely plausible at one and the same time. I'm not even sure that this is the highest rate among nations at this time, though I'm assuming it must be in the top three. I'm also assuming that where the US leads the rest of the world is likely to follow. Hope I'm wrong about this.

Then as we began to eat dinner just now, Sky News ran an item on food wastage in the UK. I can't remember the numbers, I just know that the wastage per household was staggering. This was partly related to the labelling of food and the misunderstanding of 'best-eaten by' dates so there was some kind of logic involved, but I strongly suspected that attributing the problem to that single cause was misguided. Noi and I watched in fascination the other day as a pair of well-healed ladies in Malaysia left behind almost the entirety of two dishes they'd ordered in a restaurant. It was painful to see the perfectly good food being thrown into the waste as the table was cleared. This little anecdote doesn't in any way explain the wastage on a national scale but it says something about perfectly ordinary behaviour I think most of us are very familiar with.

We make the oddest assumptions about being balanced as individuals but the crazy imbalances in the way our species deals with food should help us see a deep truth about ourselves. We are fundamentally distorted in the fundamentals of our being in any number of ways. Balance is something to seek, and seek desperately.