From condensing the meat of whole cow to the size of a human fist, to preserving seabirds in sealskins, there are hundreds of ways in which traditional cultures can teach the wasteful developed world how to preserve and conserve one of our most-precious yet most-squandered resources: food.
Each year, an estimated one third of all food produced-an astonishing 1.3 billion tons, worth around US$1 trillion-ends up rotting in the bins of consumers and retailers or spoiling due to poor transportation and harvesting practices.
Aside from the moral implications of such wastage in a world where almost 900 million people go hungry every day, unconsumed food wastes both the energy put into growing it and the fuel spent on transporting produce across vast distances.
Added to this, significant amounts of the powerful greenhouse gas methane emanate from food decomposing on landfills, while livestock and forests cleared for food production contribute to global warming-for example, agriculture and land-use changes like deforestation account for over 30 per cent of total global greenhouse gas emissions.
World Environment Day 2013, whose global host is the government and people of Mongolia, is focused on the new UN Environment Programme and UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) campaign Think.Eat.Save. Reduce Your Foodprint, which is aimed at slashing this wastage.
Mongolia is one of the fastest-growing countries in the world, and is aiming to ensure this growth goes hand in hand with a green economy and civilization. It neither wastes nor loses food at any significant level, but the nomadic life of many of its people does offer some ancient answers to the modern-day challenge of food waste.
As part of the celebrations, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) asked people to submit examples of traditional ways in which food is preserved. While some of the delicacies may not tickle the taste buds of the uninitiated, and are not intended to be replicated in countries adhering to other cultures, they demonstrate how humanity once valued food far more than it does today.
They also highlight the irony that, in an era where technology makes it ever easier to store food for longer, most people make less effort to conserve food and thus waste money-all the more surprising considering the financial crisis that has forced many to tighten their belts and recent reports that world food prices are at a 40-year high.
“Reducing food waste and loss is an economic, ethical and environmental challenge that links to some of the greatest challenges of today, from hunger and nutrition to climate change, deforestation and land degradation,” said UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner. “One of the ways everyone can contribute to these twin challenges is by looking at how less-wasteful cultures place such value on every morsel of food and considering how to emulate them.”
The ways that indigenous peoples create preserved dishes are as many and varied as the cultures and food sources that form the basis of the recipes.
Mongolian general Chinggis Khan and his troops utilized a traditional food called borts to gallop across Asia without depending on elaborate supply chains. Borts is basically concentrated beef equal to the protein of an entire cow condensed and ground down to the size of a human fist. This remarkable method of food preservation, without refrigeration, produced a meal equivalent to several steaks when the protein was shaved into hot water to make soup. [UNEP]
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