Our food provider’s plight
Desh Bir
I have lived comfortably these sixty nine years and yet I have produced neither a single food grain nor a single litre of milk nor a single fruit nor raised a single poultry bird nor grown a vegetable item. No one in my family is or has been a cultivator or grower of food of any kind, yet somebody somewhere has always been working for us.
This should be true about many of us or at least 25-30 % of the population. Those unseen hands keep working for unseen users, neither knowing the other, yet both the parties live in a symbiotic relationship.
Air, sunlight and water in all its forms, have been made available free to man and animals by nature. The first next requirement for life to exist is food and while animals and birds simply collect it from nature’s vegetation or animal kingdom, man is the only creature who has to cultivate and grow food because of his propensity for varied tastes.
The human body and its physiology being so resilient, it adapts itself to habits, normal or abnormal, that we cultivate and then long to satiate our yearnings for textures, flavours and tastes in items of consumption as food. Man alone looks for variety and in this race he employs every means to acquire the power to buy more and more diverse stuff to tickle his taste buds.
So far so good! It creates an opportunity to allow division of labour- so that people take to playing different roles and one of these roles is of the land tiller, the farmer, the food grower, the milk producer, the fruit grower and the poultry farmer!
If the produce from these hands doesn’t reach our kitchen (the non-producers’) for a couple of days we shall writhe in gut-wrenching pain and die of starvation! Yet we cry ourselves hoarse if the prices of grain or pulses or milk or fruit or vegetables show an uptrend.
Most households which never produce food spend more on petrol or electricity bill per day than they pay for the daily kitchen requirements. They are ready to pay for their drinks and meals in restaurants or the on-line Zomato or Swiggy orders without raising an eyebrow , but feel very uncomfortable if the prices for wheat or rice or pulses or oils rise only by a couple of rupees.
What we lack is a sense of proportion. We owe it to the provider of food to help him live a respectable life. We owe it to him to value every single grain or fruit or litre of milk or bunch of vegetables so that none of these items is looked upon with the haughtiness of the ungratefully rich people. We live because they work untiringly without knowing how thankful or thankless the beneficiaries of their labour are.
It is painful to swallow the fact that food worth 92000 crore rupees goes waste every year in India in the restaurants and at the wedding feasts as a result of surplus cooking or as left-over in plates.
We can add to it 50000 tons of food grain that is wasted in the storage stacks of various government agencies as it is either spoiled by rain or eaten away by rodents. The farmer works at unearthly hours of summer noon and early winter nights to irrigate crops and still languishes in penury while we mock at his ambitiousness when he borrows from a bank to finance a motorcycle for his son. Isn’t there reason enough to take another look at our hardened apathy to the food provider’s plight?
Why not say,”Thank you Grower for the food we eat”?
(The author is a Retired Principal Govt. College , Hoshiarpur (Punjab)
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