If you read The Drudge Report like 100 million other Internet savages, you may have noticed some giant above-the-fold admonitions from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown about 24 hours ago:

• “Waste not want not, Gordon Brown tells families”
• Britain declares war on food waste
• As supermarket prices spiral Brown tells families: “Stop wasting food”

You see, there’s a global food crisis. (Yes, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!™)

In fact, planet-wide food shortages are supposed to be the biggest topic of discussion at this week’s G8 summit in Japan, where Brown is in attendance to scold his countrymen — from 6,000 miles away — about not wasting food.

So how did Gordo gear up for the big food crisis talks? With a six-course lunch and an eight-course dinner consisting of 18 different gourmet dishes. Naturally.

Here’s an accounting, fromThe Independent, of the two-meal dining spree fit for Marie Antoinette:

The global food shortage was not evident. As the champagne flowed, the couples enjoyed 18 “higher-quality ingredients”, beginning with amuse-bouche of corn stuffed with caviar, smoked salmon and sea urchin pain-surprise-style, hot onion tart and winter lily bulbs.

With translations helpfully provided by the hosts, the starter menu (second course) read like a meal in itself. A folding fan-modelled tray decorated with bamboo grasses carried eight delicacies: kelp-flavoured cold Kyoto beef shabu-shabu, with asparagus dressed with sesame cream; diced fatty flesh of tuna fish, with avocado and jellied soy sauce and the Japanese herb shiso; boiled clam, tomato and shiso in jellied clear soup of clam; water shield and pink conger dressed with a vinegary soy sauce; boiled prawn with jellied tosazu-vinegar; grilled eel rolled around burdock strip; sweet potato; and fried and seasoned goby with soy sauce and sugar.

That was followed by a hairy crab kegani bisque-style soup and salt-grilled bighand thornyhead with a vinegary water pepper sauce. The main course brought the “meat sweats” – poele of milk-fed lamb flavoured with aromatic herbs and mustard, as well as roasted lamb with black truffle and pine seed oil sauce. For the cheese course, the Japanese offered a special selection with lavender honey and caramelised nuts. It was followed by a “G8 fantasy dessert” and coffee served with candied fruits and vegetables.

This was washed down with Le Reve grand cru/La Seule Gloire champagne; a sake wine, Isojiman Junmai Daiginjo Nakadori; Corton-Charlemagne 2005 (France); Ridge California Monte Bello 1997 and Tokaji Esszencia 1999 (Hungary).

The G8 leaders had earlier made do with a “working lunch” of white asparagus and truffle soup; kegani crab; supreme of chicken; and cheese and coffee with petit fours. The lubrication of choice, for those drinking, was Chateau Grillet 2005.

The TV cameras were sadly not allowed to loiter long enough to discover whether Mr Brown practised what he preaches by not wasting any of his food.

Adding insult to proverbial injury, Glasgow’s Herald newspapers notes: “Surprisingly, perhaps, African leaders — including the heads of Ethiopia, Tanzania and Senegal — were not invited to the evening feast.”

I just can’t add anything more snide than that.

Last Tuesday the Netherlands enacted a ban on indoor smoking. And this includes Amsterdam. Yes, Amsterdam. In the place where state-sanctioned hookers are a part of the local charm, in the city that practically invented the Red Light District, you may no longer light up afterward. I’m not joking.

But here’s where it gets weird. Aside from the unromantic €50 shag, Amsterdam’s biggest tourist draw is the network of around eleventy-billion “coffee shops” whose main attraction is the open sale of marijuana. Which is not affected by the nationwide no-smoking order. That’s right. You can still light up a joint. Just no cigarettes. Silly me. I thought smoking was smoking.

Think that’s strange? It gets stranger. Most locals, and some tourists, prefer to smoke a half-and-half mixture of tobacco and cannabis (AHEM — or so I’m told). And now health inspectors will actually be sent out to make sure everyone is smoking pure Maui-wowie.

We wouldn’t want anyone smoking a cigar or a hookah, or cutting their toke with a little Bali Shag. That would be wrong.

One government nimrod told the London Daily Express that “the law is to protect non-smokers from the effects of tobacco smoke. Inspectors can tell if a joint is pure or mixed with tobacco.” I bet they can. And I’m sure they desperately want American and British college kids to know their spliffs are still not contraband. But making it a crime to build a milder joint by mixing in some ordinary tobacco? Marijuana smoke contains higher levels of some toxins than tobacco smoke, after all.

Here’s a thought: Maybe the Dutch are just trying to increase food sales at all those coffee shops. Straight tobacco never gave anyone the munchies, you know.