I HOPE you’re enjoying your pancakes today. It’s amazing what pleasures can be had from a simple mix of flour, butter, milk and eggs.

At one time these ingredients would have been considered luxuries. It is to our shame today that for some families they still are. More of that later.

Pancake Tuesday is the plumper sibling to Ash Wednesday – ‘remember man that thou art dust’, and all that.

Traditionally people would use up ingredients considered too rich for Lent, and that’s where pancakes come into their own.

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Sadly, many of us have lost the art of making our own, even though it’s relatively easy.

But the supermarkets, always on the look-out for a quick buck, are happy to fill the void.

At my local supermarket I can buy sweet pancakes, cheesy ones, blueberry ones, cookies and cream-flavoured confections, pancakes flavoured with honey, maple syrup, Sicilian lemons, and there’s even gluten-free for those allergic to wheat.

This day is celebrated across the Christian world, and to be honest, flipping pancakes is among the least excessive ways of marking it.

The French-speaking world really knows how to party. Mardi Gras means ‘Fat Tuesday’, and boy do they let their hair down.

I’ll be channelling my inner hedonist by putting on some New Orleans jazz when I’m flipping pancakes this lunchtime.

Ahead of the game, the Spanish were stuffing themselves with tortillas last week on Jueves Lardero – Fat Thursday to you and me.

Behind the tradition, there’s a more serious message about our propensity to embrace excess, and the need sometimes to take a step back and reflect on life, the universe and everything.

It is not a coincidence that most of the world’s great religions embrace fasting as part of their practice.

For my Muslim neighbours it is Ramadan – its beginning determined by the first sighting of this week’s new moon.

It is significant that this year Christians (or those who decide to keep Lent) and Muslims will be walking a similar path.

The two great religions are not that far apart from one another, and we should embrace that.

Over the course of my life, Lent has been devalued, and for my children’s generation it’s pretty much an irrelevance (I blame the parents).

But it’s never been more important to take time out, to reflect on the world and our place in it, and to question the choices we make individually and collectively about our use of resources, and the impact those choices have on others.

One of the most important reference points – not just for Catholics – is Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si, which takes its title from his namesake St Francis’s canticle, Laudato Si, mi’Signore – ‘Praise be to you my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us’. ‘Sustains’ is the motivating word here.

The encyclical, endorsed by his successor, was a radical call to action over the exploitation of the earth’s natural resources, and the greed – there is no other world for it – which sees the bulk of those resources reserved for a few.

Indeed, we have so much stockpiled in our fridges and larders that in the UK alone, people throw out some 11 billion tonnes of food a year, worth around £20bn.

But this is not just a story of a rich first world and poorer developing world.

In the north, the Trussell Trust alone distributes tens of thousands of parcels a year – with a significant increase in those targeted at children.

Many food parcels go to the working poor – people in work but not paid a living wage.

From a global perspective, even the poorest of our neighbours appear rich.

Starvation is not just fact of life, it is used as a weapon of war, and it is a side-effect of the exploitation of natural resources, extracted from our “common home”, to use Pope Francis’s phrase, by multi-national conglomerates and corrupt governments.

In his encyclical, Francis dealt in turn with the problems of pollution and climate change, water poverty, loss of biodiversity, the decline in the quality of human life and the breakdown of society, global inequality, and our failure to address these challenges collectively and individually.

We do not need a pope to tell us that these things matter.

We can see what is happening to our world with our own eyes, and if we listen, we can hear the pleas of those who are starving and those who do not have access to clean water.

We can see how multi-nationals exploit our world – and how they exploit us.

This ‘Fat Tuesday’ it’s time to say enough is enough.

Let us embrace the Lenten spirit and use it as a springboard to start fighting back.

No matter how small the change we make, it can make a difference.

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