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by Jennifer Randolph '00 One cup of rice a day. Can you imagine how little that is? More than 800 million people in the world do not have enough to eat, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. If all the world's undernourished people were gathered together, the population of the continent of the hungry would dwarf that of every other continent except Asia. Hunger rises from extreme poverty, sometimes in conjunction with war and famine. There are millions of children who grow up suffering, and dying, from the lack of the simplest food. I tried, while in India, to live on one cup of rice three times a day, so three times the criteria for hunger. I was hungry all the time: my stomach churning, my head full of all the things my body wanted: gravies and peas and sweets and grease. Eventually, you train your body to desire less. Your stomach shrinks. Farther on, as you eat only a cup of rice a day, malnutrition sets in. Your body needs protein, vegetables, fruit, even simply enough calories to keep going. Severe malnutrition causes impaired vision, listlessness, stunted growth, horrible diseases and the stomach distension we have seen in news reports about suffering children in Somalia. So what are we to conclude from this? One important realization is that there is actually enough wealth in the world, but it is concentrated in the hands of the few--and that's us. The richest fifth of the world's population consumes 86% of all goods and services, while the poorest fifth consumes just 1.3%, according to the 1999 United Nations Human Development Report. The pollution of our cars and water-contaminating pesticides and mountains of styrofoam mirrors our abuse of the world's resources when it comes to food. And so we gorge ourselves on Big Macs and double lattes, and then starve ourselves on diet shakes and exercise bikes. In India it is a mark of wealth to be fat. Almost everyone is skinny--not from diet shakes, but because they don't have enough money for more than a cup of rice a day. So what are we to do? We should work for more equity in the world generally. As Americans we can support foreign policies that allow nations to develop infrastructure and economy that feed their people instead of whisking the wealth away to developed nations. This includes efforts at debt relief like the Jubilee 2000 campaign and holding the IMF and World Bank to policies that prioritize people, not profits. Food issues are related to so many other justice issues! There are organizations working to alleviate the immediate, deadly hunger so many people face today. The Hunger Project, Bread for the World, Lutheran World Relief, and so many more need funds to support people living, and dying, on less than a dollar a day. We should also not forget that hunger happens in the United States as well. While we are one of the richest countries in the world, there are also pockets of extreme poverty. This gap is widening in the U.S. in the same way as it is internationally. Those of us that have volunteered at soup kitchens and homeless shelters have seen how desperate poverty can starve Americans, too. Meeting those immediate needs and working for policies that help people out of poverty are crucial as home as well as abroad. As individuals, we can also choose to control our own consumption. We can refuse to indulge in wasteful and unnecessary purchases, even those that Americans now see as "necessities". On a food level, it takes twelve times as much energy to put beef on your table than pasta because of environmental impacts and the large amounts of food fed to cattle instead of people. Most people in the world cannot afford meat at all. Going vegetarian is one way of trying to limit the share of the world's resources that you consume. As we see the suffering from hunger of so many people here in the U.S. and all over the world, we should remember the importance of our advocacy and even our daily lives. As Gandhi reminded us, "Live simply so that others may simply live."
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