What's for dinner, luv?

Four blocks from where I live is an intersection on Louis Botha Avenue where unemployed men wait during the day, hoping that someone will offer them a job. That's not permanent employment, just something to keep hunger at bay.

South Africa is food secure as a country -- but 14-million people do not know where their next meal will come from. And another 15-million are only just not as desperate.

Some talk of the nature of agriculture, that increasingly it exists to produces food for the wealthy. Others roll up their sleeves and get on with teaching the vulnerable to grow food gardens. Some, like the Mail & Guardian newsroom, have a challenge out today to try live this day on #6Rand [just over half an American dollar], like many of the people in this country do.

At the same time, the world's scandal is that one-third of the food produced is wasted and lost. Find the Youtube clip, just over three minutes, on this.

Today is the United Nations' World Food Day.

Today, especially, food should be eaten with great awareness.

Find the chapter on food security in The Agri Handbook here.

Food wastage footprint

Isn't it a crazy world and economic system where food is wasted while human beings starve in other areas?

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has compiled a study Food Wastage Footprint: Impacts on Natural Resources which shows that the waste of some 1.3 billion tonnes of food every year harms the very natural resources we rely on to feed ourselves. The direct economic costs are some $750 billion annually!

Do we have the courage to drop our causes and our concepts to address this scandal?

Food security is one of the chapters in The Agri Handbook, while there is a whole section covering natural resources. The opening chapter is Biodiversity and ecosystems services.