Lake Chad has emigrated

This image belongs to the BBC but I have copied here because it is so dramatic. Click here to read the associated article.

You might need to click the image to see it all (depending on your screen resolution).

It shows how Lake Chad (which was once an inland sea) has dwindled over the last thirty years. The second image is from October 2001 at the end of the rainy season when the rivers and lakes should be quite full.

As river waters are being used more for irrigation, hydro power and human consumption and the climate in the semi-arid region seems to be getting drier the mighty lake is shrinking. It has already emigrated from Nigeria and Niger and looks like it might have to give up its dual nationality with Cameroon soon.

The excellent supply of high quality protein from the Lake Chad fishery is shrinking fast - which will have an effect on the whole region. For the moment, the rich soil of what was once the lake bed is providing good farming but the desert is on the move southward.

It is useless to expect the Governments to do anything useful. The whole Chad Basin is littered with the debris of past projects which have failed as a result of corrupt bureaucrats and contractors. I believe the best hope is for small scale fish farming to fill the employment and nutrition gap. The necessary water lies close under the surface of the region and artesian wells can be sunk in some areas. But is there enough expertise, interest and capital for this to happen?

Entering the 36th year of the noodle epoch

The world has been shaken by the death of the man who introduced us to the glorious age in which we now live.  I refer, of course, to Mr. Momofuku Ando, who has died in Japan, aged 96, of a heart attack.

His BBC obituary is here.

If it is has slipped your mind he is the inventor of the Pot Noodle (sometimes called the Cup noodle).

“He was a self-made man who developed an epoch-making instant noodle product and spread it to all corners of the world,” Akio Nomura, chairman of the Osaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told Kyodo news agency.

“Epoch-making”.  So has the Year of Our Lord 2007 been replaced by the Year of Our Noodles 36?

And the gospel of the “boil in the carton” noodle has apparently reached the whole earth in the previous 35 years.  Is this the end of history?  Surely, he was the perfect modern man (”self-made”) who managed to make the perfect modern food.  No cooking, no washing up, no nutrition, no history, no fuss.

Is it only in Japan, where embarrassment has effaced history and triviality is the only meaning, that epochs are made by noodles?  I fear we are only ten years behind.  Some of the “celebrities” we celebrate in the UK have achieved far less than the Colossus of the Cup Noodle.

May I wish you a blessed New Year and happy hot noodles.