Putting it another way . . . Brumby’s kilojoule counter might make people aware of the eating crisis we face.

I know, though, that most nutritionists recommend counting kilojoules as a way to become a “good eater’’ and as an aid to “getting a life’’ in general.

They also recognise that an over-emphasis on counting established unhealthy mental patterns within the client and that this usually begins with a misrepresentation of the scope and import of the eating programme.

More tickets from off the back of a cereal packet.

World Vision features an article in its most recent e-newsletter describing a supporter’s 20-litre-per-day challenge.

I remember, too, an SBS documentary on Global Village that told us that people in the slums of Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, get by on 15 litres of water per day, per person.

Methods of farming are different to suit; plots built into the stepped mountainside and water released once or twice a day from a pumping station at the top of the hill, through gutters or aqueducts that feed each plot.

On this strange tangent, I also recall hearing that a large quantity of South America’s dairy farming country went underwater with the changing climate a couple of years ago, and that the resourceful “peasant folk’’ had begun to farm fish . . . or was that just a really vivid dream?

Perhaps if householders had to eat proportionately as much in food as each wastes in water, we’d be able to see the potential benefits of water conservation.

That, or appear on a reality TV program . . . better value for money than a water right, anyway.

No more pesky and labour-intensive imagination required.

ELIZABETH SCANLON,

Maldon