The Brown & White

I feel terrible about the food wasted in our dinner plates every time I leave the dining halls.

Just a couple of days ago, I saw a student in Rathbone leave a half a plate of spaghetti and a burger with only one bite and then pass by the little blackboard where it is written that "26 million people could be fed by one-third of the food Americans waste every day."

Our attitude toward food may reflect our perception of sustainability. Lehigh received a C+ from the Sustainable Endowments Institute on the 2010 Green Report Card, the same grade as previous years. (See Lehigh Receives C+ on Sustainability Report Card in the Oct. 20 issue of The Brown and White).

Perhaps Lehigh could benefit from some Chinese wisdom on the dining hall wasting issue. Wasting food is considered a flagrant form of disrespect to farmers in traditional Chinese culture.

During my childhood, I was taught not to waste even a grain of rice by a famous poem called "Sympathy for the Farmers," which describes the hard life of ancient Chinese farmers.

There is another famous Chinese proverb that says "wasting food is a crime." According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), there are still one billion people suffering from starvation worldwide and six million children dying from undernourishment every year. Actually, to a certain extent, it is we who kill them.

Our nation's annual amount of food production is quite stable. This means the more food we waste, the less international aid we can offer, and the less people we can save.

To be frank, food wasting is a pervasive problem in colleges nationwide but it is also a problem that would be impossible to be solved overnight. But we are Lehigh.

We never abandon ourselves to the bad examples of others. Let's lead the nation starting in Rathbone and the U.C. to challenge this disastrous behavior and put an end to it.