Waste not...

It was a very cheeky thing to think, but I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only person who contemplated the old “well, why don’t you put it in an envelope and post it to them then?” answer.

This, of course, wasn’t an answer to a question.

It would have been a smart-ass answer to a statement of fact. This fact, usually from our parents but sometimes from an older brother or sister, informed us that there were “hundreds of children in Africa or India – (or you can insert your own example here) who were starving and who would love that food.”

And the food in question was always something you hated.

Broccoli perhaps. Or cabbage. Or, in my case, any kind of vegetable that wasn’t a spud.

Funnily enough while I might have thought about the putting it in an envelope answer, I don’t think I’d ever have dared to say it out loud.

This is because we might well have got a wallop around the ear for our cheekiness and yep, we’d have deserved it.

And we couldn’t even go running off to ring some helpline or other if we did get a clip, because, well, there was only one person on our street who had a phone and, if she knew you were going to ring such a helpline (if one had existed way back then) and why, you’d probably have had a clip on the ear from her too.

All that said I was thinking about the whole food wastage thing this week.

I was using some pieces of old leftover bread and other bits and pieces to feed the wee birds that were scrounging around our garden in search of food.

But I did wonder if that was the best stuff to put out.

I mean, when you go to the shops and they have those wee net things of bird food, they are never filled with pieces of bread and crushed up cornflakes.

That said, I was more than happy with the results of my scrounge, particularly since I hit on what I thought was an ingenious addition to the feast – a pineapple.

Well, okay, not a whole pineapple, but slices of pineapple and wee chunks that I had cut from the whole pineapple.

Putting this out for the birds also served another purpose, it meant there was never any possibility that it would end up on a plate with my dinner.

Let’s just say at this stage that I hate pineapple but that’s something I’ll go into in more detail soon.

As it turned out though, I soon discovered that birds - at least the ones who visit my garden - must hate pineapple as much as I do.

At the start I thought this was funny and these birds went way up in my estimation. “Yay,” I thought to myself, “I was always right about pineapples.”

And, let’s face it folks, if starving birds were leaving it when it was - 8 outside, it does say how crap this must be as a fruit.

But after a while it started to annoy me. I mean, not only had I cut the pineapple up into slices and chunks, I had also spent several minutes with my hand dipped in horrible pineapple juice lacing a piece of string through some of the pieces so they could hang from a branch and birds who didn’t like eating from the ground could have some.

But that didn’t matter. None of the birds wanted the pineapple when there was good stuff like a crushed weetabix, crushed cornflakes and pieces of bread.

A few of them pushed the pineapple around a bit, but mostly they ignored it and I soon found myself thinking ‘there are probably starving birds in Africa who’d love a piece of pineapple.’

I even muttered it aloud at one point and I was sure I saw one of the wee birds looking back in my direction.

It didn’t make a sound, but I know what it was thinking!