“33% of food is thrown away. It doesn’t make sense for people to starve,” denounced the Log Horacio Arruda, emblematic figure of health in Quebec, in a rare public outing, Friday, on the sidelines of an event in Centre-du-Québec.
“There are health inequalities between people who are well nourished and those who are not well nourished,” lamented in an interview with the Log Horacio Arruda, Assistant Deputy Minister at the Ministry of Health, on the sidelines of a meeting on biofood, in Drummondville, Friday.
“I can’t believe that Quebec children don’t have enough to eat. There are plenty. We have a collective responsibility,” he adds.
However, according to him, there are solutions. Key promising leads have been funded by the Quebec Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAPAQ) and the Ministry of Health, he points out.
“There is recovery being done right now. There is a whole chain from the producer to the collective kitchens”, he illustrates.
- Listen to Isabelle Maréchal ignite about increases, available via :
Horacio Arruda recalls that people will even help producers who lack the manpower to harvest vegetables that would otherwise be left in the fields. Technological innovation also has a role to play, he says.
Double loss
For Horacio Arruda, we must multiply audacious projects to harvest the fields because what is not taken becomes a double loss, because we produce greenhouse gases unnecessarily with one in production that we do not consume. .
“There are a lot of fruits and vegetables that can for example be transformed into soup to feed people,” he recalls.
Beyond waste, Horacio Arruda is sounding the alarm on “society diseases” such as type 2 diabetes.
“Type 2 diabetes didn’t exist in teenagers when I started my career, and now we have it,” he observes.
“To maintain our healthcare system, we must act upstream,” he concludes.