Wing or Leg?

WHEN I was a child, Sunday was that special day when we ate roast chicken. In those poor, post-war years, it was the gastronomical highlight of the week, and my family was among the very few in the neighbourhood who could afford it.

My two brothers and I used to sit expectantly around the table while my father uncorked the wine and my mother partitioned the dainty treat in front of us. As it happened, the three of us had a preference for the wings, and the problem was, of course, that a chicken, like any bird, only has two wings. This meant that we three had to take turns to ‘renounce’ the weekly delicious treat.

One Sunday it was my ‘turn’ to renounce the wing, and as my mother, in solemn silence, was handing me the plate with a leg and fries, for some unknown reason, the expression “YUK” escaped my lips for the first and last time in my life.

While the unfortunate expression was still ringing around that silent room, my father looked at me with a gaze halfway between sadness and anger. He then tersely told me, “Go back to your room. No lunch for you today!”



That evening I found exactly the same food I had disdained for lunch on the table. I can assure you that I gulped it all down to the last morsel, and found it really delicious. And, by the way, do you know what my favourite part is now? Well, you’ve guessed it, the legs, even though I still find the wings quite tasty, especially Buffalo Wings.

Times have changed, and sending a child to bed without dinner is no longer seen as an appropriate way to discipline a child. They say children may have future eating disorders, and by focusing on being hungry, they would not even think about the wrongdoing.

Unfortunately every year 165 million children go to bed without any dinner, and wake up on the following morning feeling even hungrier not because they have misbehaved, but because their parents are living in abject poverty, and cannot feed them.

One outrageous feature of our economic system is that it is very effective in producing an overabundance of wealth, including food, while it is utterly dysfunctional when it comes to distributing this abundance equally. This is due to that ‘throwaway culture’ which Pope Francis has so often stigmatised as symptomatic of the greed prevalent in so many people today, and the consequent disregard for those on the margins of society.



This problem reaches truly tragic proportions when we consider foodstuffs. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) there are about 800 million human beings who are suffering from chronic hunger, while 2 billion people are undernourished. At the same time, 500 million people are obese, and 1.5 billion are overweight. In practice, for every person who goes hungry there is another person who eats too much. If we juxtapose these figures with those given by the charity Oxfam which informs us that today 1 percent of the world’s population own as much as the remaining 99, we see that the scale of global inequality is simply staggering.

The world is in the midst of what Saint Pope John Paul II called the ‘paradox of abundance.’ Our late Pope was referring to the fact that there is sufficient food to feed every mouth on the planet, but this food is not reaching many of these mouths because of waste, excessive consumption by some, and the use of food for other purposes.

Last February Pope Francis sent a video message to a meeting of 500 international political and business representatives gathered in Milan to discuss the theme of the upcoming Universal Exhibition Expo 2015: Feeding Our Planet – Energy For Life. In his message the Pope stressed that “instead of going for provisional emergency proposals, we must act decisively” to “resolve the structural causes of poverty,” by remembering that “the root of all evils is inequality.” Pope Francis quoted from his Evangelii Gaudium to proclaim his “no” to “an economy of exclusion and inequality.” He added that “human dignity and common good” should be the “pillars of healthy economic politics,” and that the protection of the earth, which is “the Mother of everybody” should always be a priority. He concluded his message by quoting an old farmer: “God always forgives, man sometimes, but the earth never.”



My father has long since passed away, but I am grateful for that punishment; I have never had any eating disorder, but I have learned that one should never despise food because it is a gift from God, a gift we should share with all our sisters and brothers.