Throwing Away Food
Sad to see this news come from a state that I’ll be soon closely associated with:
BHUBANESWAR: In a country where millions go to bed hungry, Rs 1 million worth of food meant as a holy offering at Orissa’s Jagannath temple was destroyed on Friday because a foreigner had entered it — an act seen as defiling the premises. The shrine administration decided to destroy the food that was prepared for offering to the deities, temple official Laxmidhar Pujapanda said. A mud pit was dug in the premises and the holy offering was thrown in it [source.]
While I am aware of the strong orthodox views of few Indian temples that practice such discriminatory behavior, I agree with Atanu’s viewpoint that as long as these temples aren’t public property, we cannot dictate who they should or should not allow inside their premises. I had ranted on the issue of Sabarimala temple sometime back. But at the same time, wastage of such colossal quantities of food pains me. Heck, even if such large quantities of food was wasted in a country where no one went hungry, I would still be bothered.
Perhaps it is the Indian tendency/tradition of conserving food due to social scarcity but it is nevertheless a noble one. If the temple authorities feared associating themselves with the ‘defiled’ food then they could have ‘conducted a yagna to disassociate’ (bear with me, trying to be a lil creative here) themselves from it and leave the food alone in a lonely corner outside the temple complex. I’m sure the ‘defiled’ food would find plenty of takers even in the most religious of towns. Ash tells me plenty of people from other religions come for the feast organized by the temple because the food is really good. They aren’t detected because they ‘look Hindu’. Now, the poor foreigner would have never thought his white skin would someday land him in trouble.
Abundance of food makes you appreciate it even less and statistics tell that almost 20-25% of food bought in America is wasted. Although we cannot control everyone’e behavior, I wish this number be a lot less in the future. Or perhaps we need to be deprived of it. Ah! as some user behavior analyst would say, duh!
“Throwing Away Food” [Short URL: http://www.ipatrix.com/?p=1925] was published Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 8:00 am by Patrix, filed under Current Affairs, India, Observations, Religion, Society Culture, and tagged as Current Affairs, India, Observations, Orissa, Religion. Both comments and linkbacks are closed.
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