The first of the Fridays in the season of Lent is here and today we will abstain from eating meat. One of the things I have always found fascinating is that if you look at many of the most popular ethnics foods from around the world it is in fact the food of the poor, non-meat proteins. Pick your favorite from pastas to beans and rice to falafel.
People in nations around the world have found ways to eat without the big slab of meat, mostly because they have no choice. Today over 41,000 children will die of hunger. Lack of vitamin A kills one million children a year.
Today the church forces us to stop and think about what we eat and what we throw away. In the US approximately 27% of the food available for consumption is thrown away. The EPA estimates that we generate 30 million tons of food waste per year. Imagine how many we could feed, if we were only a bit more careful with what God has given us.
