Seeker

Did you know that an estimated 30 - 50% of all the food produced on planet Earth is lost before reaching a human stomach? There are 2 ways to waste food. One is to eat more than needed. The other is not to make good use of what has been grown for food. I often eat more than I need. I'm now starting an effort to put that right. This means food is rather more on my mind than I'd like it to be just now and I certainly didn't intend to blog about it.  Then I heard a statistic that shocked me. It was that 30 - 50% of the world's food produced for human consumption is never eaten. Put that alongside the fact that millions in the world can't get enough to eat and it looks like a crime against humanity. It is sinful and one way or another we are all caught up in the systems that perpetuate this. I don't usually read reports from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers , but this morning I read Dr Tim Fox's report Global Food: Waste Not, Want Not . It...

I've recently been on holiday in Austria. One of the things I enjoy in the Tyrol is the ' Lüftmalerei' - wall paintings applied to freshly applied plaster on house walls. You can also see this in Bavaria in Germany. Sometimes the wall-paintings take the form of false windows, as the one in this photo and the one below. They are on the outside of a baker's shop in Neustift in the Stubaital.  The words above the 'window' mean literally 'our daily bread give us today'. It is a quote from the Lord's Prayer and means 'give us what we need to live today'. We need basic nourishment for the body - bread or other staple food, fresh each day. We also need sustenance for the spirit. There are many ways in which people seek and find that - through art, music, beauty, prayer, sport, sex, love...the list could go on. Ultimately the deepest hungers are not easily satisfied. We tend to always want more. In thinking about the gospel reading for t...