It’s hard to find a culture as obsessed with food as ours, and this may or may not have anything to do with our recently earned title as the Fattest Country in Asia. Nearly half of our population is overweight or obese.

But it could have been worse. Apparently, we also throw away a lot of food. According to research by Solid Waste Corporation Management (SWCorp), we waste 15,000 tonnes of food every day. Imagine how much fatter we would be if we swallowed those 15,000 tonnes.

SWCorp also found that a typical Malaysian family of five spends about RM900 per month on food. The Star made some calculations and estimated that such a family would waste about RM2,700 worth of food per year, which works out to RM255 a month.

That sounds truly luxurious, but also crazy. We are getting fat off the vibrant, varied and vivid foods of the land, and we can afford to waste a quarter of the food we buy, enough to feed entire families. So even as we complain that times are hard, we’re eating so well that we can afford to throw a lot of food away.

Another study found that out of the 15,000 tonnes of food we waste daily, 3,000 tonnes represent needless waste. This means that there are a whole lot of us out there ordering more than we can finish and just throwing the rest away.

It does look like our cultural obsession with food has got out of hand. The fact that there is avoidable waste means that we are greedy enough to ignore our actual capacity for food. Our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, as the old saying goes.

Ramadan is drawing near. Perhaps it’s time for us all to draw some inspiration from the season and moderate ourselves to be more conscientious when indulging in food. At the same time, we must be careful not to let appetite rule when buying food for the breaking of the fast. That will result in more wastage and would be against the Ramadan spirit, when moderation and mindfulness are the values that should be inculcated.