Quite Random

Bugger.

Friday, and another week grinds to a close. I’m mystified by the same problem Adrianne’s having – my trousers have all shrunk. My 501s are hanging in there, but I had a very depressing moment the other day when I put on my North Face trousers, the ones I wore throughout 2005, and when I finally relaxed, the popper popped open and my gut, Homer Simpson-like, reinflated, jiggled, and settled. Shit. Too much booze, too much chocolate, not enough doing energetic stuff. I’m drifting, as Marwood put it, into the arena of the unwell. OK, I haven’t broken my ankle or anything, I just feel turgid.

At home we waste food on a scale I haven’t achieved in several years. Buying food in fits and spurts, poor meal planning, taking things out to defrost before throwing them away a few days later, letting things dry out in the fridge, cooking too much, leaving leftovers, buying takeaways. I hate it. I could control my consumption living on my own, but sharing with someone else hasn’t made it as easy, and perfectly good food keeps ending up in the bin. It’s heartbreaking, I have got into bad habits, and I have to stop it.

Humans are eating the planet. There are currently six and a half billion of us, increasing to nine and a half billion in the next forty to fifty years. Yes. Within your lifetime, if you’re lucky, there will be just under fifty percent more people on the planet than there are now. Food production is already responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than anything else, from food processing and packaging to agricultural production and livestock emissions, and yet food production is contributing to climate change that will decimate agriculture in many parts of the world.

I like not to get too carried away with alarmist predictions for the future, but really, we’re screwed. Soylent Green, anyone?