Skyrocketing fuel prices; rising food prices; food shortages; wasteful elections and red red wine – our writer wonders where we are all headed.

It felt surreal.

The newspaper's headline that day screamed, "UN chief raises spectre of a billion starving people". In front of me was a buffet over-spilling with food. Rose pink shrimps draped ever so delicately over glistening blocks of ice, crispy greens bursting with goodness at the salad bar, oysters gleaming with freshness, pasta in all shapes and sizes waiting to be cooked al dente to your liking and the dessert counter prettily decked out with tasty morsels of calories.

I was seated near the sushi bar at Town at the Fullerton Hotel. I watched the chefs masterfully prepare the sushi while their customers, mostly businessmen, waited patiently to enjoy that day's freshest catch. One man could hardly fit on the stool, his belly spilling over as though in sympathy with the display of food.

I read that sushi's going to cost much more now with the rise in fuel prices. The boats going out to catch the fish have to be powered somehow. Rice has risen 61%, soya beans 57.4%, corn 51.2%, wheat 45.3% and milk 33.5% – that's today's prices compared with June 2007's.

Higher prices, food shortages, "global catastrophe if food riots spread", another headline read.

The waiter wants to know what we will have. I scan the menu. It's thick. I can't decide. Japanese? Thai? Singaporean? American? Italian? French? Fusion? I can only eat one item; do I need so many choices? Obviously, the hotel thinks yes – the customer is king, the king must be feted and fed.

On one hand, the world of excess. On the other, the world of no access. Can they ever be bridged?

If we are so smart as to start eBay, can we not start WasteBay where people with more can give to people with less on an everyday, ongoing basis? A demand and supply mix-and-match system which redistributes the excess food supply to the people in greatest need?

My lunch companion's voice interrupts my train of thought. "The world's gone crazy. I can't believe my countrymen voted for a black man over a white woman."

Yes, the news had just come in that Barrack Obama, "the son of a Kenyan father and a white American woman" (notice he's still classified as black, not grey), had won the race against Hillary Clinton, the first woman candidate for president. Notice the media never says she is white, just "woman".

My friend adds, "The test will be when a black man with no experience stands against a white man with experience."

Yes, take away all the rhetoric, and politics is stripped down to a black and white television set.

The economy meanwhile is stripped down to the booming, and the boomed and busted.

Vietnam is increasingly looking like it belongs to the latter. "Vietnam may be heading towards a financial crisis," said one headline. The same has also been said about Iceland, by the way.

"If you believe in Armageddon, this is the moment," said my lunch companion.

Frankly, I don't know what I believe in anymore but I do know what I want to believe.

"Powered by cabernet – red wine, long life and huge implications", read the headline. Yes, we have heard it before – that a glass of red a day makes for a stronger heart – but now the scientists are taking it much more seriously and are working on drugs that contain "resveratol", an ingredient of some red wines, because they have found that mice dosed with it live longer.

Thing is, do we really want people to live longer when we can't even feed the ones who haven't even lived?

Yeoh Siew Hoon, one of Asia's most respected travel editors and commentators, writes a regular column on news, trends and issues in the hospitality industry for 4Hoteliers.com.

Siew Hoon, who has covered the tourism industry in Asia/Pacific for the past 20 years, runs SHY Ventures Pte Ltd. Her other writings can be found at www.thetransitcafe.com

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