Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security
Food security always makes me think about food waste.<p>When I was 17 years old I went to Sweden as part of a cultural exchange program (I&#x27;m from South America). One of the first things that shocked me was the sheer amount of food being wasted for no reason whatsoever.<p>In my country, even though I come from a privileged family, you can&#x27;t shield yourself away from poverty. Throughout my entire life living with my parents I&#x27;ve seen people ring our door to ask for food. Personally, I NEVER waste any food, if I put something on my plate, I&#x27;ll eat it unless it&#x27;s rotten. And that goes for pretty much everyone I know. Every time I went out to eat with my parents, if there were any significant amount of food left, we would always ponder whether or not we would want to it later. If we decided we would not, we would take it anyway and find someone on the street who would.<p>While in Sweden, I lived with Swedish families and attended to a traditional Swedish high school. So I&#x27;d eat lunch at school and dinner with my host families. My first day eating lunch at school I was shocked, to say the least. I mean, yeah, the food was great, it&#x27;s amazing that there is such a functional high-quality school system there, and so organized too; once you&#x27;re done eating, you&#x27;re supposed to take your plate, put any leftovers on a big trash bin, and give your plate to the lady who puts them into a industrial washer. The amount of food kids threw away was just staggering. And it&#x27;s not a one off thing. It&#x27;s a behavior, they put more food than they know they&#x27;ll eat, every single day. It&#x27;s not like they put a ridiculous amount of food on their plate and throw most of it away. It&#x27;s like they don&#x27;t even bother paying attention to how hungry they are, they just put whatever amount of food they feel like putting, and then throw away the rest. That goes even for drinks, they would serve a cup full of milk or water, and throw half of it away.<p>I know I&#x27;m talking about kids and teenagers, but they will grow up to be adults some day. And I saw that of many adults also. On of my duties as an exchange student was to connect both cultures, mine and the country I was being hosted by. I always tried to give people there a glimpse of what of poverty was and how privileged they were, and I always felt I never got the idea through. It felt sometimes they have a cartoonish idea of poverty and what it means to not have the money to pay for really basic things.<p>I&#x27;m not here to call anyone out. I just think there are times when the people are also part of problem, and I wanted to give a personal perspective.