?Honey, try this stewed beef with Mukeunji,? my grandma offered to me on Chuseok, a traditional Korean Thanksgiving Day. I started to enjoy it until I heard my grandmother saying, ?It?s the taste of two year old Kimchi.? I was so shocked that I almost spat out what I had in my mouth. Not believing that she offered this spoiled food, I exclaimed, ?Grandma, we cannot eat two year old food!? Then, everyone in the room looked at me and started laughing. My father kindly explained that ?Mukenji? was only one of the many ways to keep the food last longer. In olden days, the food was so precious that they could not afford anything go wasted. Only half a century ago, Koreans suffered from severe poverty and hunger. Today, we do not appreciate the abundance of food and the true value of food.

Considering this unfortunate development in my own country, I was inspired to write this essay on how we can reduce foodprint. Mukeunji could be a piece of wisdom that can help solve the worldwide food wastage problem and deteriorating environment. There could be more things that we can learn from the past if we put our hearts and minds to it. Some of our best solutions do not need to be so high-tech and expensive.

Reducing foodprint can help address some of the world?s most pressing issues. Yet, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says that many people are not aware of foodprint. According to the world-wide campaigns by Think.Eat.Save and FAO, foodprint, also referred as carbon footprint, is the greenhouse gas released from the human activities of food: growing, production, processing, packaging, transportation and even marketing and distribution of food. The saddest part may be the fact that third of all food production gets lost or wasted in the food production or consumption systems. We could have directed this ?waste? to feed over 900,000 million hungry people world-wide, according to FAO.

Our ancestors? wisdom of conserving and preserving food may be the simplest, smartest and most economical way to reduce foodprint. When food is preserved for a long time, it may lose its enjoyable taste and essential nutrients. However, many cultures have used effective and economical ways to protect the benefits and values of preserving food for a long time. For example, Kimchi, which is one of the most popular Korean dishes, is preserved in pots called ?hang-a-ri,? which is buried in the ground or modern Kimchi refrigerators to keep the even temperature and no air spoiling it. By using this method, Kimchi is allowed to enhance its fine taste and maintain its valuable nutrients through fermentation. Like Kimchi, there are many other Korean traditional spices and food that take advantage of this old practice to effectively and economically reducing foodprint.

Korean ancestors had another way of decreasing foodprint: consumption of locally grown organic food that tends to be healthier. They only got organic and seasonal food from the surroundings, which there was no need of any environmental concerns from the food being delivered, packaged or from the artificial fertilizers, pesticides and greenhouses. The most common way for them to get food from the surroundings, was by farming.

However, because of a huge amount of food loss every year when harvesting, people, whether they were rich or poor, valued food and never dared to have any food waste. Even when they had leftovers, which they hardly did, the food was composted and fed to domestic animals or used as spontaneous fertilizers. I had never known what it meant to compost food waste, even two years ago. However, as I joined in gardening club in school last year, it was an opportunity for me to actually try out how composting works. First, we arranged the entire school to put away any leftover foods that came from plants in the composting bins after lunch. Then, we took the bins full of food waste that only came from plants or even the used tissues, which also came from trees, to the garden. We mixed a little amount of horse or cow feces with the food and let them permeate so that they become as one and it can be reused as a nutritious fertilizer for the plants. By actually practicing one of the ways to reduce foodprint and raising awareness at our school, I got to care more about our environment and thought that other hundreds of schools in Korea could do this as well.

The little actions that my school and I practice cannot change current global course of uncontrollable foodprint. However, having more people like us will. To accomplish this goal, I need to raise the awareness of people world-wide by educating them of our cultures? old wisdoms. When they learn that our Earth is very sick and reminding them of millions dying from avoidable hunger, we all can take more conscientious and caring steps to reducing the foodprint.

I will take my actions by producing videos and writing articles of the seriousness of the causes and effects of foodprint. I will also demonstrate what I do everyday to reduce foodprint. Then, I will upload them on CNN iReport, UNEP Tunza and other free, yet powerful, social and news networks. There is a saying in Korea that every little helps a lot. I hope more people get enlightened about the seriousness of foodprint and take their own actions to save our world and our humanity.

This was what I submitted for the 6th Eco-generation Environmental Essay Competition. I just wanted to share it! :)