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Waste not, want not

I WAS in Swaziland, interviewing people on remote farms, when I came across a tiny – and obviously sickly – puppy. The daughter of the house was following me around as I took pics, so I turned to her and asked: “What is this puppy eating? What do you feed him?”

“Porridge,” she said.

Deep breath. Then I launched into The Spiel – puppies can’t thrive on porridge, they need protein, do your chickens lay eggs? And so on… I just can’t stop myself.

It’s the curse of being a journalist who deals with social, health and environmental issues. You know too much. And you just can’t turn off that little voice in your head that downloads streams of info constantly.

It was so great sitting at a recent conference with people who’ve worked in these areas, some with NGOs, some as communicators or journalists. For once I wasn’t the only nutcase in the room.

They understood what it feels like to sit in a queue at Dis-Chem, and while everyone else is focused on their smartphones, with an occasional break to look at the candid comedy looping on the overhead screen, you’re the one watching the process of dishing out meds and wondering: what happens to the plastic ties?

You know, the ones they use to seal the metal mesh baskets into which they put the drugs? You’ll carry that to the front and the cashier will snip it right off. Do they get recycled?

They understood what it feels like to be the only person in the shopping mall who doesn’t fall on the gorgeous, puffy, colourfully iced cupcakes being sold under the banner, Cupcakes for Cancer, with glee, the only person within 20 storefronts either way who feels so conflicted.

I mean, yes, I’ll support raising funds for to fight cancer anytime, having walked alongside a beloved person while he journeyed through cancer – but cupcakes, seriously? “A sugar-laden diet may raise your risk of dying of heart disease even if you aren’t overweight. So says a major study published online this week in JAMA Internal Medicine,” wrote the Harvard Health Blog in 2014. There’s about a thousand other health reasons NOT to dip into the candy store; should cancer fundraisers be using a sugar fix like this?

They understood how it feels when you rock up for a conference on strategies to fight pollution – and see the rows and rows of desks supplied with 500ml bottles of water, all plastic. Those bottles take a thousand years to bio-degrade and about 80% of them end up in landfills, not being recycled. (Two million TONS of ‘em in USA landfills alone!) Hard to focus on the keynote speaker with that in mind.

They understood my rage when I ended up at a health company’s ‘workshop’ which is primarily a sales tool for the company concerned – and see doctors and other medics gorging themselves on elegant finger foods, few of them materially nutritional or healthy, and then wandering off to the CPD counter to get their continuing professional development points. That’s how we keep our healthcare professionals up to date, with wasteful expenditure on glitzy events that don’t feed ‘em decent info?

They understood what it feels like to go straight from a desperately impoverished shack settlement in the North West, taking photographs of children for whom a donation of your kid’s old fleece is such an event, they’ll put it on in 35 degree heat, to a boardroom in Sandton where the sleek gym bunnies are complaining about Ecomobility Month and cherry-picking from the sandwiches and pastries laid out on the sideboard, most of which will be untouched at the end of the meeting.

About a third of our food is wasted – admittedly most of that is in distribution, not at the endpoint – and I can’t help thinking that it might help if people at the top end took a stand and committed to not wasting food.

They understood what goes on in my brain as I try yet again to get hold of – oh, you know, local government, municipalities, mineworkers pension funds, organisations like that. “Your call is important,” and ‘Press 4 for claims”… I’m thinking, this is driving me nuts, but at least it’s not costing me funds I can’t afford, and I’m not a poor, uneducated person whose first language is neither English nor Afrikaans, trying to navigate this hideous terrain from some outlying rural area.

Today I saw some clever thinking around waste, at least: a dad who noticed how the crayons handed out to kids at fast food joints are simply thrown away set up a process that sees them donated to children’s wards in hospitals. Nice, not so?

In France, retailers are now by law not allowed to throw away unsold food – it has to go to charities or for animal feed. Why can’t we enact something like that – or better yet, why don’t the food retailers decide to do that of their own accord? Contact Food Bank SA for how to do this effectively.

The cost of food waste… unrecycled water bottles… under-nourished people and animals… poorly-policed CPD points handed out by pharmaceuticals and other for-profits… these costs land at our door ultimately, yours and mine. Surely there must be plenty of people bright enough to share and implement clever ideas to deal with them?

*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.

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