Many are dying each day for lack of food because of the increase in the price of oil. Just to do my part, this morning when I was ready to toss out the old jar of peanut butter and open the new one, I scrapped just enough out of it for another pancake. That is one way to be less wasteful.

Feel free to share how you are helping with the global food crisis.

It is not just the price of oil that is the problem with feeding the masses, it is also the price of rice, wheat, corn and other commodities that have hiked in price. Part of the problem is that farmers in the USA are growing crops for ethanol production. This is in itself causing the price of food to hike.

As far as being less wasteful there are loads of things we can do in developed countries. We have more food than we need each week. One thing we have started doing is to prepare a menu for the week before going shopping for groceries. We buy to meet that menu and nothing more. When we buy an item in bulk we make sure that we have slotted that item in several times in the weeks ahead to ensure that we use that item.

The production of ethanol is tied to the price of oil. Biofuels have had a big impact on the cost of food but there is a link between that and the price of oil. There has been other issues too. The Midwest flooding in the US as caused the loss of many crops. The recent tomato scare caused many farmers to plow under hundreds of tons of tomatoes.

This is not the way to overcome the food crisis. Gordon Brown and fellow G8 members had a 6 course lunch and then an 8 course dinner just prior to discussing the food crisis.

I see Brittan is telling supermarkets to stop offering deals like 3-for-the-price-of-2 on can goods and other such deals because people waste too much so they want the cost of food to be more to make people waste less. Hmmmm, somehow a government trying to make food cost more doesn't seem like one looking out for the folks - especially the poor ones.

I think that art of gardening is an important and forgotten art. If more people gardened, the food would be much better and cheaper methinks. It's hard to compete with good homegrown veg or fruit. It just tastes so much better than supermarket stuff. I know that it takes time and dedication, but there are things that we all could do to make it much easier. The same goes for energy. There are plenty of free energy floating around. It take some work to set it up, but you can do much as a community to invest in some free energy units. Some areas would obviously be more favorable than others, but nevertheless... that's something to consider. What do you think?

I just ran water to the back side of my lot so we can start gardening.

Awesome,

California climate is pretty favorable needless to say. I've read about a family in a city who packed pretty good sized garden in their back yard and got most of their produce that way? Have you seen the story. I think some news channel picked it up. Here... I found the story...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/22/HOGTMK219B1.DTL&type=printable

Pretty cool methinks

I just visited someone in an apartment and was amazed at how much stuff they were growing out of pots.

We have a 1/2 acre lot so we can grow a garden bigger than what I have time to take care of.