“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.” said Martin Luther King Jr when he accepted his Nobel Peace Prize. Today we realise that while it’s possible, it’s not happening. It’s more than likely that 2010 will be the year that the world will experience a food crisis of unprecedented magnitude and that a real possibility exists that it will run out of food.  Record setting droughts, exploding populations and crippling crop

failures all over the world are combining to set the stage for a potentially devastating food crisis in the coming year.  Over the last two years, the world housing market collapsed, credit markets were frozen, the Wall street brokerage firms, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers bit the dust as did Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae*, AIG famously petered out, Iceland faced it’s biggest economic collapse ever, the major American auto manufacturers hit rock bottom and had to be bailed out and the dollar took a really serious knock. The rest of the world followed suit – some recovering more swiftly, other’s taking a goodly while but notwithstanding chaos and major losses (some very tragic), the global financial systems are still hobbling along quite well. This will not be the case with the food crisis that we are going to face this year! No amount of government bail out, central bank intervention or even private lending will be able to prevent this one – but what’s so frustrating is that nobody’s really discussing it! Because of the 2009 financial crisis, food production understandably fell and supply and demand in global food markets wobbled badly! Low commodity pricing and no credit does that kind of thing and then, in the meantime, China and her Asian sister exporters, in a mad effort to ensure their

continued economic growth, began to emulate America and provided their consumers with overly cheap credit and easy loans – the Chinese consumers didn’t hesitate and started buying, throwing their usual caution to the wind. Not to be outdone, the US Department of Agriculture adjusted their figures to delay the rise in their own food prices – but this could only be temporary and all they did was to ensure a 2010 rise in food prices! In the meantime, one environmental disaster after another is destroying the lives of thousands and affecting the lives of millions. In Haiti many mothers wait a while before they name their newborn babies because so many of them simply die of malnourishment, other mothers have to parcel out food to their children and some have to make excruciating choices when food rationing fails. In the rest of the world about a billion people are starving and every 6 seconds one child dies of hunger. More people are dying of hunger than of AIDS and most of us don’t even know about it which is why we can’t do anything about it  - after all, starving masses don’t really make for interesting reading. Don’t get me wrong according to Raj Patel, in his book, Stuffed or Starved – the Hidden Battle for the World Food System, there’s plenty of food around, we just can’t seem to distribute it so that everyone is fed. The rise in global hunger can also be attributed to the following:

• Surging oil costs have made it more expensive to harvest, fertilize, store and deliver food.
• The rise in droughts and hurricanes worldwide has wiped out crops and made farming more difficult.
• Unusual freezing temperatures are destroying root crops in the ground, wiping out citrus orchards and devastating food producers around the world.
• The world is running out of raw materials like water, oil and good soil, vital for keeping the food system in tact.

According to Paul Roberts, author of The End of Food, the food system, as it is, cannot go on and he makes a good point and a few good suggestions but he fails to offer a workable solution except for advising us to to eat less meat because it’s just too expensive for the planet too sustain. We all know that we can thank the massive junk food chains for a huge chunk of our woes but we can all try and make a difference at home. Why not start by cutting out one meat meal a week because even that will make a difference and, if nothing else, make you aware that we are eating too much while others are eating far too little. So while brilliant brokers peddle the fact that the oil price will probably rise and really bright young entrepreneurs invest in food silos while the going’s good, why don’t we all do something right here at home – even if it’s only done in solidarity?

AUBERGINES IN YOGHURT

Ingredients

• 400 g small aubergines, thinly sliced into rounds
• 250ml plain full cream Greek yoghurt (unless of course you can get hold of Indian yoghurt)
• 1 lemon, finely grated zest only (optional)
• 1 heaped tsp cumin seeds, dry toasted in a frying pan and ground in a mortar and pestle
• 1 tsp ground turmeric
• 1 ½ tsp finely ground red chillies
• 1-1½ tsp sugar
• Sea salt, to taste
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• 1 generous handful fresh coriander leaves, chopped, to garnish

Method

• Dust the aubergine slices with the turmeric, salt and half of the finely ground red chillies using your hands to cover the whole area.
• Heat the oil in a large, non-stick frying pan and fry the aubergine slices until they are soft – set them aside
• Whisk 200 ml of the yoghurt with the sugar, some salt and the rest of the ground red chillies and pour this into a saucepan to heat gently, continuously stirring often to prevent it from spitting – does this for about 6 minutes.
• Now stir in the ground cumin and then add the aubergine slices, heat them very gently and stir to combine everything and finally, stir in the rest of the yoghurt – check and correct the seasoning and garnish with fresh coriander.

CHAMBRAY

Ingredients

• 250 g rice
• 2 cm piece of cinnamon
• 4 dried bay leaves
• 1 tsp black cumin seeds
• ½ tbsp turmeric powder
• Salt to taste
• 2 tbsp ghee

Method

• Soak the rice with bay-leaves and cinnamon for half an hour and then heat the ghee in a wok, add all the ingredients as well as the soaked rice – fry in the ghee for about 5 minutes until the ghee separates.
• Pour in water slowly and allow the rice to cook, stirring occasionally so that it doesn’t stick until it is cooked.

*Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created by Congress to “provide funding to mortgage lenders by purchasing their mortgages and then holding them or selling them to investors in the form of securities that they guarantee.”