70's retro feeling

As a kid in the 70's I was consistently told three things by my parents.

1. Petrol was very expensive and would run out before I grew up.
   
2. The population of China would one day exceed 1 billion people.
3. The left over food on your plate was enough to feed a starving family for a week.

Today Jonathon Shaw, the UK Labour Government's food minister, repeated this third mantra and upon reading it I felt a sudden urge to find him and impose a series of paper-cuts upon his person.

His argument was that children should eat all the food on their plate to ensure that they learn to value it. This is because the cost of food will remain high for years to come and we need to learn to stop wasting "about £10 billion worth of food every year". So says this mighty minion of our nanny state.

These statements strike me as absurd. Surely if we're wasting that much money on food each year we should just stop spending the money and consequently eat less?

I'm sure there are thousands of people out there approaching middle age like me unable to walk away from a plate of food because of this screwed up logic. We diet and binge and diet again.

If the developed nations are eating too much food, judging by the size of some people squashed against me on public transport there are quite a lot of them, and the NHS is overwhelmed with patients who have eating disorders then surely this is the simplest solution to the problem. Or maybe I'm just naive?

I'm off to find out exactly what Filipino farmers do eat for a week and stick to something close to it. I'm sure that it involves rice, a food that is becoming more expensive every day, and vegetables. I'll post some recipes along with calorie count, cost and total wasted.

I'm hoping this will be the start of a movement to reduce our food foot print in the developed world.