As a child what we do stays with us for a long time. However, what we learn from it is up to us. How to translate that experience to a value system or to a money system or to any system that we become part of is therefore important. Most important of all is the experience that you had as a child with food.
Maybe it is because I came from a farmer’s family or spent most of my childhood times on farmland. Maybe because of both. Several experiences are still fresh in my memory. One of them was cooking rice. Starting from lighting up a kerosene stove till such time the rice coming to life all puffed up and ready to eat has taught me many virtues that accounts for my responsibilities, my patience with time, my curiosity in anything that transforms from what it is to what it could be and my respect for farmers who spend their lifetimes to let us have that as our staple food.
Food presents differently to different people depending on how they have started their lives from their childhood. Of course, over a period of time the value that a food holds in their lives keep changing as their lifestyle changes for better or worse. If it gets better, the food value diminishes and if it gets worse, the food value takes off. However, it plays an important role as a staple food for some, status food for some, culinary curiosity for some, adventures for some, travel for some and a waste for some. The only place where it does not become a waste is when for those it is a staple food. All others amount to waste of some kind and degree of waste in each of those roles that food plays vary.
Respecting food starts from leaving food for some like birds, not wasting food that we put on our plates and better still not to put on anything that is more than what we require. Respecting the food with respect to its storage, its distribution to eventual sales in whatever form it is possible, respecting those who grow the food that lands on our plates either as dinner or lunch or breakfast or snacks and respecting the community with which we share the food goes a long way to reduce wastage and unhealthy consumption.