June 5 is World Environment Day

Remember when you were young and you balked at eating something on your dinner plate? Your mother probably said something like, "Don't waste food. Children are starving in" -- and she'd name a place. The place your mother would most likely name is strongly correlated with your age. Right after World War II, mothers of Baby Boomers would say, "Children are starving in Europe." Later, it would more likely be, "Children are starving in Asia," or, still later, "Children are starving in Africa."

Well, the mothers of the world seem to have taken over this year's World Environment Day, a U.N. observance on the calendars of just about all the Usual Suspects for Wednesday, June 5.

The theme for this year's World Environment Day, "Think-Eat-Save," encourages us to all reduce our "foodprint." The linked website advises that, "According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), every year 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted. This is equivalent to the same amount produced in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, 1 in every 7 people in the world go to bed hungry and more than 20,000 children under the age of 5 die daily from hunger."

We never understood how cleaning our plates would do one bit of good for the starving in Europe or Asia or Africa, but the U.N. clearly agrees with our mothers: End world hunger -- clean your plate.

Wednesday is also National Running Day and National Gingerbread Day. Is this how the nursery rhyme ties in? (You remember: You can run, you can run as fast as you can. / But you can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man.)

June 5 is also National Moonshine Day. We'll drink to that.