Thursday, 26 September 2013

Food Waste

World hunger defined as the mass famine around the world. World hunger consists of famine, dehydration and lack of necessary nutrition and food supply in all countries. World hunger is bad and getting worse nowadays, there are millions of people suffering from hunger somewhere in the world. What would you do with 2 dollars? The things you can do with 2 dollars, you can buy a new app and get smarter or else you can buy a snack and be a couch potato. With 2 dollars, you can buy a lottery dreaming you get luck or you can just save it in your piggy bank. But do you know that there are 3 billion people in the world today struggle to survive on 2 dollars per day? Do you know that every 3.6 seconds a child dies because of hunger and every year 15 million children die of hunger? 2 dollars may not a big deal for us but it could support a parent to feed his or her children in Africa. Hunger, poverty and food prices are inextricably linked. Not every poor person is hungry but almost all hungry people are poor. Millions people live with hunger and malnourishment because they cannot afford to buy enough food at all, cannot afford nutritious foods or cannot afford the farming supplies they need to grow enough food of their own.
 
We all know there are billion people suffering from hunger, we all know people dying because they have no food and clean water to support their life but when comes to reality, you can see people are wasting food and water; they just take all that as granted. According to the United Nations’ food agency, around 1.3 billion metric tons of food, or one third of what is produced for human consumption, gets lost or wasted every year. Pope Francis said that wasting food is like stealing from the tables of those who are poor and hungry. People are wasting food often because they buy too much and have to throw away what they do not manage to eat. Food wasted always occurred in food service and restaurants; restaurant will try to keep more food than they need on hand to make sure that everything on the menu is available. Plate waste is more serious in cafeterias and especially in buffet, since customers can usually fill various plates, sometimes they can unlimited refill, and this occur unrecoverable waste. Although the restaurant has remind customers do not wasted food but people just enough and take the foods which they not able to finish at the end.
 
As I mentioned before, world hunger is bad and getting worse nowadays due to inflation, poor people are more suffering from it as their salary cannot afford the high cost of living. More people are malnutrition because food is too expensive. When these poor people are worry about food to survive, there is an amount of people enjoyed wasting food as celebration. Generally, food is an important part of any celebration in all nations of the world, regardless of any culture or religion. Do you know some countries have their odd way of food celebration, each and every year people around the world enjoy such festivals by disgusting use of food? In these festivals, food gets spilled, thrown away in a childish way and wasted just for the enjoyment purpose only. There is thousands of starving kids in America alone, and you can easily figure out what for the whole world. Unfortunately, it is mostly America which wastes food on world wide scale. These food festivals are just waste of food in weirdest, wackiest way and nothing else. For instance, La Tomatina. La Tomatina is world’s biggest food fight. La Tomatina is a festival that held in the Valencian town of Bunol. In this festival, participants throw tomatoes at each other. This festival has a rule that people can start throwing the tomatoes only after a horn sounded and they should end when it sounded a second time. They will celebrate it every month and waste tons of tomatoes every year. Other than that, La Raima grape throwing festival in Spain, there are steady procession of trucks loaded with grapes about 40 to 90 tons of grapes. They start to throw grapes to each other which greatly cause to food wastage.
 
Food is a gift from God, we should respect on food and appreciate what god gives us which eating with joy and do not wasting food. Food is not wasted for the enjoyment purpose; if God were appear to the millions of hungry people, it would be in the form of food. Some restaurants will design a huge portion of food as promotion item such as free of charge if you can finish the huge meal in a time in order to create brand awareness and attract people to consume. Generally, customers cannot finish the meal and it cause food waste. My friends told me that they are going to Burger Lab for dinner and also enjoy the biggest burger in Malaysia. This is a promotion which anyone can finish the biggest burger then it will be free of charges, however it will be charged 80bucks if mission failed. Obviously, my friends cannot finish the biggest burger and they know as well yet they still wanted to order the biggest burger just for fun. How ridiculous when people know they actually cannot finish the large portion of food but still want to take it. Wasteful practices at home seem equally as common. We wasted food majority reason is bought more food than was needed in our kitchen or occasionally threw out uneaten or uncooked food, we purchased too much because the food prices were cheap. Every 3.6 seconds a child dies because of hunger however food been wasted in every seconds as well. Look at what’s happening, food has been wasted and thrown out at wedding banquets. Imagine, if these wasted food can be delivered to the people who suffering from hunger, how many people can be survived? Don’t waste food, think of all the hungry children in Africa before you throw out the foods.  

 
 
 
 

References
N/AN/D. La Tomatina Tours. [online] viewed on: 23/9/2013, Available from: http://www.latomatinatours.com/
 

Thursday, 5 September 2013

ANIMAL RIGHTS


Do animals have rights? This is one of the controversial topics today in the world, people are still arguing about it. Some people might say that animals have no rights because they do not have human thought. They feel no pain, have no thoughts, desires, emotions or interests.  Man is the soul of the universe therefore animals do not deserve rights. Some people might say that animals should be treated the same like humans. Although they cannot speak and not smarter as human but they are living too. Animals are the creation of God not only human, therefore human should give them basic rights. They have rights just as we have rights.

So what are animal rights when we talk about? Animal rights are the belief that animals deserve rights to life, liberty and happiness. Animals rights is not about putting animals above humans, or giving animals the same right as humans but they should be treated in an humane way instead of abusing them. Protection of animal rights supporters who believe that animals are not to be used as our food, clothing, entertainment, experiment or some other attempts, they should also be of concaern to human attention and loves no matter they are not lovable or useless.

For my opinion, animals have rights and they deserve to be treated in humane way. Why animals have rights? This is because they live and breathe like us. They may not be like us, but they can feel pain and fear and all those emotions like us. Some people might say that animals have no rights, they do not deserved it because they have no human thought and no sense of morality so they do not need moral rights too. We always think that man is the soul of the universe, just because we are smarter than animals so we do not have to give them our respect and treat them in humane way. In fact, every single life on earth is the creation of God, there is no one can judge who is deserve to live or die.

Although animals not able to speak, they not able to do what we do but they can still feel pain. Can you imagine yourself as an animal, you couldn’t speak and the butcher is going to put down on you but you’re helpless, no matter how you screaming there is no one comes to rescue you. You will never know how they feel when they are waiting to be butchered. Humans are the real monster, don’t you agree? Humans are cruel and selfish, if we realize that the person or thing is benefit to us then we will try to get it by fair means or foul.
 
As we know, dog meat has been eaten in China for thousands years. According to Korea Animal Rights Advocates (2013), dog meat is a traditional medicine which supposed to boost energy and male virility. Dog stew is also popular as a way of warming blood especially in China’s cold North. There is countless thousands of dogs are inhumanely caged, beaten, tortured, killed and butchered everyday, just to feed the Chinese demand for dog meat. Eating dog meats is common in China, you can easily found it on any restaurant. Also, you can get the video easily from Youtube about how the dogs in China. Simply put, the dogs in China are treated in inhumane way and they have no rights. Dog meats in China have already become one of the local food and eating dog meats are one of the culture in China. In China, the people even celebrate Chinese Dog Meat Festival. This is a cruelty event in Guangxi, and around 10,000 dogs are due to slaughtered. According to Global Voices (2013), the new agency Xinhua said that eating dog meat is a eating culture in the society, therefore it is not illegal and has nothing to do with morality.

Animals been treated in inhumane way is happening every day, not only in China. According to World Wide Fund For Nature (N/D), every year, up to 73 millions of sharks are killed to meet our tremendous demand of shark fin soup, as popular Chinese delicacy. Shark fin soup is cruel! They fins are often sliced off while the sharks are still alive, then their bodies are thrown back into the water as the sharks bear a painful death from suffocation, blood loss, or predation by other species.  Shark fin soup is one of the luxury food, some people believe that shark fin soup has high in nutritional value yet it doesn’t even have any real nutritional value. In fact, shark fin contained some diseases such as dementia, Lou Gehrig’s disease and other degenerative brain diseases, (Chinese Network TV, 2012). Based on the early studies, eating shark fins have risk of mercury poisoning.

Man’s relation with animals is very old. Animals are not our goods to satisfy our desire and achieve highest monetary profits yet they are our friends and neighbors. Some people might say that only humans understand rights so only humans can have rights. Some people also said that they are animals, they feel no pain or do not have any emotional. This is very ridicules. Children cannot understand rights, yet we do not deny them rights. Therefore we should not hold back from giving rights to animals because they not smarter as human or not same as human. There are a lot of issues showed that animals can feel pain although they not able to speak. We as a human should defend their rights because we are their voices. Animals do not judge anyone but we human judge everyone. Animals do not care whether you are pretty or ugly, rich or poor, bad or good, they treat us equally but we human judge a person from a quick look If man is the soul of the universe then we must not treated animals in inhumane way. We have human thought; we know what things right and wrong. We should not hurt them badly. We can even always see there are thousands of cats and dogs injured or killed in road traffic accidents each year yet there is no laws to punish those irresponsible drivers. This is a very serious ethic problem in society nowadays. The world could be better than yesterday when we cooperate to manage it in a harmonious atmosphere. Please do give animals’ basic rights and treat them in humane way. We all dream the same dream about living. Let’s All Live It And Don’t Eat Animals.
 
 
 
 
References:
N/A, 2013. China’s Animal Rights Law Bans Dog and Cat Eating. [online]viewed on: 3/9/2013, Available from: http://animalrightskorea.org/dog-related-news/chinas-animal-rights-law-bans-dog-and-cat-eating.html
 
Owen, 2013. Chinese Social Web Slams Local Dog Meat Festival. [online]viewed on: 3/9/2013, Available from: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2013/06/25/chinese-social-web-slams-local-dog-meat-festival/
 
N/A, 2012. Shark fin will be the risk of mercury poisoning. [online]viewed on: 4/9/2013, Available from: http://jiankang.cntv.cn/20120911/100053.shtml