THE number of television programmes on the subject of cooking and dining is excessive. It gives the impression of a nation of gluttons.

There is also a trend towards property-buying programmes on TV. Half or three-quarters of a million pounds is frequently paid and received on such transactions.

People preparing food, sometimes not even eaten, sits uncomfortably with the starvation and malnutrition prevalent in some parts of the world.

Likewise, well-heeled people selling and buying property at excessive prices, disturbingly contrasts with the many living inadequately, or without any home, or struggling to pay the rent.

CS Jeffrey, East Mount Road, York.


• WILL the daily bread we eat disappear from the supermarket shelves?

While we spend all our treasure on foreign wars, and what's left on debt repayments, the real enemy was knocking at the gate.

That enemy is Ug99, a fungus that causes stem rust, a calamitous disease of wheat. Its spores alight on a wheat leaf, then work their way into the flesh of the plant and hijack its metabolism, siphoning off nutrients that would otherwise fatten the grains. The wheat then dies.

It was discovered in Uganda in 1999 and has been spreading rapidly.

It is now present in Iran, and the world’s biggest grain consumers, India and China are concerned, to put it mildly, that they will be next. It will only take one spore, on one tourist, to jump continents.

That means that famine could stalk the world, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

We’ve already got war. It’s time we in the West decided where the priorities should lie.

We need to spend on research. War or food, it’s that simple.

Chris Clayton, Hempland Drive, York.