THERE IS an apocryphal tale of a council building contract in the olden days when corruption was allegedly rife. An Aberdeen firm bid £9000, which consisted of £3000 for materials, £3000 for labour and £3000 profit. A Glasgow company bid £18,000 with costs of £6000 in each category.

But the contract was won by a local Dundee firm that bid £27,000. The breakdown was £9000 to be split between certain councillors, £9000 for the Dundee company and £9000 for the Aberdeen boys to do the work.

These days, you don't get that kind of petty profiteering from the public purse. As last week's report from the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) reveals, our construction companies play for much higher stakes. The OFT alleges that no fewer than 112 building firms have been involved in rigging bids and tenders that generated an extra profit to them of some £300 million.

These contracts were for such projects as schools, hospitals and hospices. The cowboy construction companies were not just allegedly robbing you and me, but also the sick and the dying.

The OFT says that 5% of the cases investigated involved cash pay-offs to rival firms who had deliberately over-priced their bid to avoid winning the contract. The Construction Federation has responded by pointing out that such practices are not illegal. Indeed, the OFT plans to impose fines on the companies involved. But they have not passed on any of their information to the police.

So none of the captains of the construction industry who stole £300m of our money will be going to jail. Imprisonment for stealing public money these days is, of course, reserved for single mothers who cheat on benefits to buy shoes for the weans.

You would have thought our politicians might be up in arms on this issue. But this may not happen while so many elected members are busy padding their own expenses and while political parties are accepting large donations from construction companies.

THE world food crisis manifests itself in different ways in different countries.

In Britain, families who spend £100 on a week's shopping are having to find an extra £11 to maintain their calorific intake.

In too many Third World countries, a child's calorific intake is a couple of spoonfuls of rice every other day.

In the US, the crisis, largely speaking, is that far too many people are eating far too many calories.

There are solutions for some of these situations. The average British family could easily shave 10% off their weekly spend on food. Cut back on biscuits, processed foods, and fizzy drinks. Replace these items with a bit of home baking, healthy stews with loads of veg, washed down with nature's finest drink, eau de tap.

For most of us there is the simple option of eating and drinking less.

Last time I looked, Lidl and Aldi and even the more upmarket supermarkets were packed with cheap food.

Nobody in Britain need go hungry. Despite the Labour government's best efforts in abolishing the 10p tax band and taking £40 a year out of the pockets of the lowest earners.

I take a zero-tolerance attitude to hunger. If there are people out there who cannot feed themselves or their children, phone me on 07940 585 433 and we'll do a spot of shopping. Genuine callers only. Offer applies to northwest Glasgow and while stocks of spare cash last.

In the third world the issues are much complex. Elsewhere in this newspaper, keener minds will explain the geopolitics of hunger as the soaring prices of staple foodstuffs puts even the most basic of diets beyond the reach of millions of people.

I read in the New York Times, a reliable publication, that in Haiti the poor are eating mud patties. It is a simple recipe but one which you will probably not be trying for Sunday lunch.

Take some mud. Add a dash of butter, oil and sugar. "You don't know you're eating dirt and it makes your stomach quiet down," says a destitute Haitian for whom the mud patty is becoming an increasing part of his diet.

As you would expect, the natives in Haiti are revolting. They are not alone. In scores of countries across the world there are food riots as the poor starve, often while tinpot politicians siphon off for their own use vast sums of public money that could be used to alleviate the hunger.

So how do we divert calories from developed countries where people die from overeating to poorer nations where people die from starvation?

This question has been taxing Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations, and his advisers, and all the brains at the World Bank and many other international agencies. The answer appears to be that there is no answer. People will get hungrier. And they will get angrier and rise in revolt.

The have-calories nations may soon regret that they did not wage war on hunger with the same alacrity as they embraced their so-called war on terror.

BUT, hey, the world food crisis is not all bad news. We're talking clouds and silver linings.

Part of the huge hike in food prices is down to speculation. The hedge funds and other financial vampires, having made loads of money out of subprime mortgages and having left the housing market in disarray, have moved on to commodities.

Dealing in foodstuffs these days gives higher returns than stocks or bonds or real estate. They are profiting mightily by buying and selling soybeans and sorghum. These dealers never actually see the soybeans or sorghum, a bit like the Third World poor, who don't see much of them either.

Our pension funds have also been getting into commodity dealing. The security of our monthly cheque may now depend on a family in Burkina Faso paying a week's wages for a bag of rice. Even individual investors are encouraged to have a flutter on the futures market.

I have been involved myself. I saw some crispy pork belly in the See Woo Chinese supermarket in sunny Possil last week. I speculated that it would go nicely with some noodles and soy sauce, and I was right.

WHAT about these aforementioned troubled folk in the US, I hear you ask, whose crisis is that they are eating too much?

Worry not, they could be eating more. The third most common refuse found at landfills in America is discarded food, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Worry even less, because the Americans now have an over-the-counter medicine to help cope with food addiction. It is a pill called Alli. It works by preventing the digestive system from breaking down 25% of fat consumed.

The excess fat is expelled naturally. "You may recognize it in the toilet as something that looks like the oil on top of a pizza," the manufacturers, GlaxoSmithKline, say, kinda folksily, on the Alli website.

Mucking about with the digestive system in this fashion has what Glaxo calls "treatment effects" or "faecal incontinence" or the "Alli oops" syndrome.

Suffice to say that Glaxo recommends Alli users wear dark trousers while undergoing treatment. And to take with them an Alli Oops bag with spare underwear, baby wipes, a plastic bag for the soiled clothes, an air freshener spray, and a proprietary stain remover to get that yellow pizza oil off the upholstery on your office chair. The champagne cork is optional.

It seems to me like bulimia by any other name. The manufacturers point out that users should not have an Alli Oops moment if they consume less than 15 grammes of fat per meal. But, this being America, fat is a way of life. One McFlurry and you're off to the rest-room in a hurry.

By the way, the Alli treatment costs about £1 a day. Or enough to keep a very large family of Haitians off the mud diet.