The flip side of fasting

When the evening call to prayer rang out as I went to board the tram the other night, the platform attendant called out to me, stepping out of his booth to offer me a date -- the traditional food used to break the fast during Ramadan. Onboard, a man carried a large bottle of water and a plastic cup down the aisle, offering sips to fellow Muslims who had been abstaining from food or drink since before sunrise. In the historical center of the city, families brought pots of tea, freshly baked bread, and home-cooked dishes to eat on the grassy Hippodrome in the shadow of the area's great mosque.

These modest fast-breaking practices, however, are increasingly being supplanted by lavish meals that many say dishonor the spirit of the Muslim holy month -- and create an immense amount of waste....

Read the rest of "Muslims Fight Food Waste During Ramadan" over at TreeHugger, where I blog four times a week about environmental issues in Turkey and around the world. Like what you see there? Subscribe to my personal TreeHugger RSS feed.

Photo by Istanbul during Ramadan by laszlo-photo via Flickr. The illuminated writing between the mosque's minarets reads "Believers are brothers."