It was quite a bit of rant on respecting food and connecting with food to bridge the gap. I got bit carried away as this was close to my heart. I was seeing wastage all around me and almost every day. But, there are wastages that we cannot see – we get to hear about them once in a while. Momentarily, we get to show our emotions in our own unique ways and we forget about it soon after as we are not close to it to really feel it.
My uncle got depressed when the rains did not show up at the time he was expecting it to come. As a kid, it never occurred to me how important that rain was for him. He knew from his experience that the production will drop as a result of it. Of course, I used to question him about canal water to support his crop. Yet, access to it remained elusive to him for many more years, which I did not know. Even that did not seem to solve his other problems. The crop got some unknown diseases or every husk turned out to be hollow even when the crop looked fine from outside.
There will be wastage if the crop is not stored properly or the help to store it does not come at the right time. Even storage has its own issues. Theft was one of them as silos were nothing but poorly constructed huts with absolutely no doors. Again, they are preventable, but the pain does not stop there. A small neglect would cause the entire stored grains susceptible to insect attacks and again we stand to lose certain percentage of stored grains.