Wrap Broadcast September 4 2009 Most people are up for a bargain. Most people are attracted by the idea of saving money. So how would you like to have an extra £550 to spend this year? According to an organisation called WRAP (the Waste and Resources Action Programme), families in Scotland are wasting an average of £550 each year by simply throwing out food - the majority of which could have been eaten. It all adds up to £1bn for Scotland as a whole. My goodness, with £550 you could get an adult and child season ticket to St Mirren and still have change left over for Bovril and pies! Or if I couldn’t convince you to do that, then what about a new camera or plasma TV? Some of the food we throw out may be banana skins and old tea bags, but according to WRAP the majority of food that is thrown away could have been eaten if it were stored properly and if people took more care over planning their meals. To this sad tale we can add the fact that it costs about £85m to dispose of this waste - which we pay through our council tax. Plus there’s an environmental cost as nearly 2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere. Meanwhile, around our planet, every year 15 million children die of hunger. The World Health Organisation estimates that one third of the world are over-fed, one third are under-fed, and one third are starving. We need to learn to make better use of our resources, and we need to think about our moral responsibility to those who (through no fault of their own) live in areas of the world where simply survival can be a bitter struggle. A Christian writer called Ronald Sider once wrote that “we need to live more simply so that others may simply live”. At our best as human beings we know we need to share the resources of our world more fairly. We need to think about waste, about the environment and about the needs of others. Well, we can make a wee start next time we go for a food shop.