Dorothee
Germany
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On Sunday I couldn’t go to church in my home village as I had a hands-on training in a church in Reutlingen. On Sundays like these I just prefer going to church in Reutlingen and its surroundings, like Sondelfingen, Betzingen or Metzingen – as I did on Sunday, October 4th. Fact is that Sunday, October 4th is also the day of the German-Roman-Catholic equivalent of Thanksgiving, called “Erntedankfest”. In fact protestants have an “Erntedankfest”, too, but they just don’t want to celebrate on the same day as Roman-Catholics. Anyway the thing is that we not only use this day to thank God for having enough to eat to survive, but on that day German clerics usually also criticize the fact that we have too much, while so many have too little; that we destroy parts of nature and kill animals only to produce more food than we would need. This year for example the priest criticized the fact that each year the average German buys two shopping carts of food that he’s going to throw away anyway. Some buy more than they can eat as the food they buy – for example meat, soy, eggs, dairy products – is comparably cheap and thus not too much of a loss for them if it goes to waste. Others want to try something new, realize they don’t like the taste of it and as they don’t want to give it to somebody else they simply throw it away. Thoughtless people simply don’t even pay too much attention to what they buy. This may sound ridiculous at first, but when they for example want to buy fish and enjoy let’s say salmon the most, they go to the multideck cabinet, pick out any random packaging that contains fish and don’t realize until they have to pay at the cash box that firstly the fish they bought isn’t exactly the fish they really like to eat and secondly it is only one day away from its expiration date. The priest called this disrespectful not only towards nature that provides us with all this delicious food and that we exploit for our overproduction of food, not only disrespectful towards animals and human workers alike who do hard physical work that goes with bad treatment to provide us with nutrients, but it’s also disrespectful towards millions of people who right now are starving in the least developed countries of this world including Togo.
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