We’ve been working flat out this past week off the boat (well as flat out as you can with Covid although both of us have now finally tested negative) refurbishing a rental house as one tenant left for another to move in. It’s been a salutary time of ups and downs.
The tenant who left was a single mum of one who has lived there for several years. She told us she wanted to stay but struggled to make ends meet after being laid off for part of last year due to the pandemic and now facing mounting costs. She and her child have moved in with her mum.
After she left we moved in to refurbish the house. One of the first things we found was the freezer section of the fridge freezer literally crammed with food. Knowing how strapped she is for cash, we rang and asked when she wanted to come and fetch it. The response had us lost for words: “, I haven’t used it in ages, just chuck it please.”
It felt so wrong throwing food away when the UK’s food poverty rate is among the highest in Europe. This week The Big Issue has an article which makes sobering reading.
Food banks in the area where the house is can’t handle frozen food. They just couldn’t take it. Many recipients of food banks haven’t the capacity to freeze food either, and the dates on the food proved the point that hundreds of pounds worth of food had been languishing in that freezer for months. The food was highly processed, mainly ready meals.
While many people end up in food poverty because of low or irregular incomes, spiralling costs of living and debt, it made me wonder how much unintentional waste many of us may be creating through carelessness, or ignorance.
Are you like me, guilty of any of these:
*Not keeping an eye on dates on products – particularly on food which can lead to food waste.
*Not teaching our children to revere and reward frugality to prevent waste.
*Not making the most of what we have so there will be more to go further.
I find it alarming and shameful to think how thoughtlessly wasteful I’ve been in my own working and personal life over the decades.
I know at home and at work I have been unintentionally over-consuming. This profligacy of ignorance could have allowed someone else to benefit rather than to go short. It might even have allowed a company to make more profits to plough back in. If enough of us enabled that then perhaps another person would have a job, an income.
Waste not want not was seen as a wartime mantra. Mother Theresa said she only ever felt anger when she saw waste. This week I understood how she felt but I also felt sad. Sad that a little family is struggling when with some guidance they might be able to manage a little more easily.
If we all wasted less there would be more to go round. It isn’t rocket science. If we consciously consumed there less resources would be used, wasted and there would be more to share.
I felt really bad this week but grateful too, to be spurred on to do my bit to make sure that I waste less, use less. Graveyards are full of buried unfulfilled dreams, I don’t want my vow to make the world world a better place in my own small way to come to nought. I have to do more to ensure it happens.
We’re back on board aware that having a smaller space helps us be more frugal, less wasteful but also that as we revel more in the glories around us we feel we need less to make us satisfied, fulfilled.
Pickingupducks 