Hunger- a worldwide issue that is crucial to the health and overall life of human beings. Hunger throughout the world in not only present in poor countries such as Haiti, China, and India; hungry and malnourished infants, children, and adults are everywhere, even America. This may be surprising because America is known to be one of the most obese countries, but this certainly does not represent everyone. There are plenty of Americans that do not get the correct and healthy amount of food that is crucial for survival; 42.2 million Americans live in households with an inadequate amount of food, including 29.1 million adults and 13.1 million children (Hunger in America). Healthy bodies and minds are directed related to an individual's intelligence, attitude, and overall way of life (Hunger in America).
“Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there not being enough food to eat” (Goal 2: Zero Hunger); where some individuals consume too much food that leads to obesity, others do not have the opportunity to get enough food, leading to malnutrition and starvation. With this being said, pantries, organizations, and goals need to be made so that hunger throughout the world could stop. Three specific actions to end hunger could include setting up more convenient pantries for individuals to attend, organizations getting together to provide meals and a place to eat, and setting goals to have less and less people go hungry each year.
Starting off, there are a few pantries in my area and I believe that every area throughout the world should have pantries to provide for those in need. Pantries in my area include, The People’s Pantry and The Brick Visitation Relief Center, which were created after the devastating hurricane, Superstorm Sandy, in 2012. Both of these pantries provide food and services for people who still have not gotten back into a regular lifestyle and are in need of food and supplies. The Peoples Pantry says that one of their main goals is to break the stigma surrounding food insecurity and educate others about how common this problem really is. It may not be realized but, a lack of a stable source of food affects over 79,000 residents in
What may be hard to see is that hunger is everywhere. Yes, hunger is in Africa and third-world countries, but also in the United States. Childhood hunger is nearly a bigger issue than overall hunger in the United States. Studies show that hunger among children has a higher percentage than hunger as a whole (Feeding America 28). It is found that children suffer from food insecurity in every county in the United States (Feeding America 30). It is easy to sit back and think that everyone has the financial and physical means to find food, but they do not. Over thirty percent of all children (under the age of eighteen) in New Mexico live in food insecure households; this state has the highest percent in the entire United States (Feeding America
Hunger in America can be hard to recognize. With how the economy is now, the effects of hunger are more severe. Many Americans are relying on food stamps and private organizations to help with this crisis. Millions in this nation are currently suffering from hunger in America. Half of that being from job loss. More than 12,000,000 children suffer from food insecure hunger because of limited or uncertain access to nutritious food. About 900,000 are hungry in the three- country Detroit metropolitan area alone. The hardest hits are the elderly, the unemployed, immigrants, and the mentally and physically impaired.
More than 44 million people in 2009 were identified as living in food insecurity, the USDA’s current term for going hungry (Imhoff 17). The government, nonprofits and other organizations have been drafting potential solutions for a while to solve world hunger, but the number of food insecure people is still exceptionally high and on the rise. The complete abolishment of it is presumably unattainable, but reducing it to a much smaller amount is certainly possible and a necessity. All American citizens are targets. One economic depression or catastrophic mishap may leave you in food insecurity and desperate need for help. So don't you wish our country has a well-functioning system able to support us all? The US’s main answer to food insecurity is the Farm Bill. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs(SNAP) is the major program contained in the bill. From 2008-2010, 72.3% of the farm bill and 53.1 billion dollars was dedicated to SNAP, and current enrollment in it is at the highest (Imhoff 52). Is SNAP the best solution to widespread hunger? Should the United States dedicate so much money in effort to it? “The current SNAP program is so deeply flawed, the United States should draft another “food stamp” policy and remove it from the Food Bill.
Many people do not realize that hunger and malnutrition is a problem that many Americans face on a daily basis. Maybe, we are failing to realize that our country is not perfect, but if we don’t try to do anything then more and more children will die. The problem with child hunger is that the United States may not face as dramatic problems with hunger as that of other countries, but
People in Houston were told to evacuate their homes and to leave everything behind, due to the hurricane, but they couldn’t leave everything so they compromised and only brought with them the things that were an absolute necessity. Not a lot of people are able to compromise so easily. For some people this is a hard subject to grasp. Food is a major thing to in society today that not many people can agree on. Food is such a huge part of our everyday lives, but when two people are asked what they want to eat it seems that no one can come to an agreement. Food, however, is, “something beautiful to be shared with people” (M.F.K. Fisher), not something to cause problems and arguments when a decision about the food can’t be made. More often than not it’s really hard to compromise, but when it’s for the greater good and taking in account people other than yourself, there’s a certain satisfaction earned. In order to be considered a “well-rounded person” in society, it is inevitable that one has the ability to compromise. I had to experience compromise first hand in the humid, swampy, hot, seafood loving, Louisiana. “Four regions of south Louisiana were settled by the Cajuns.” (Ducote). So it’s probably pretty safe to say that Louisiana houses some pretty good, traditional Cajun food. This experience has helped me to realize my place in our culture when in comes to being a cordial, agreeable person.
Although the United States government spends $176 billion on hunger programs every year, there are currently more than 46 million Americans going hungry every day. In the U.S. every county, state, or congressional district experiences some form of malnutrition and hunger. Right now there is a rapid increase in the number of hungry Americans and the issue is quickly becoming problematic. Today one in six Americans participate in one or more of the fifteen nutrition assistance programs funded by the government and provided by the USDA. Recently more people have begun to question what hunger really is, what all the programs actually do, and what their results are.
Everybody knows the feeling of hunger before his or her next meal. Think of that gnawing, empty feeling in your stomach. That feeling, that discomfort, is nothing compared to what millions are going through everyday in America alone. Imagine always being incredibly hungry. Imagine not knowing where your next meal will come from. Imagine not knowing if you will even get to eat each and every day. Millions of Americans, children and adults alike, suffer from those exact feelings. There are countless starving people in America, and as some of the more fortunate, we need to do something about it.
In Mexico, around forty five percent of its one hundred and eighteen million people face food shortages or hunger. In south America, nearly ten million Peruvians suffer from hunger; that is nearly one-third of the population. In many countries around the world, it is the rural poor who suffer most. Hunger and disease, is usually in close combination and often precipitated by natural disasters or war, have plagued humankind throughout history. People need nutrition to be strong and to be able to go to school or work, but without any healthy food that cannot happen. Their bodies cannot process the activities or material they are shown due to lack of nutrients that you get from healthy sustenance. therefore, they are not able to get a good paying job or education for later in their future. World hunger is a problem that must be addressed as seen through illness,
For this paper, I would like to discuss the hunger issues we have in the United States. Nearly 18 million households in the US remain “food insecure” (Tanner, 2013). Being food insecure is when some does not know when or how they are going to receive their next meal. Children are not receiving the necessary nutrition they need to be able to grow and develop properly and many people in the US are becoming obese because of the unhealthy food that is available for people at such a low price. As of July of 2015, 45,480,644 people received benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition
While most reports highlights the severity of hunger in many developing nations, many suffering from hunger can happen in our backyard too. In the US, prolific families suffering from malnourishment and food insecurity makes up 12.7%
Here is food for thought: Is hunger affecting your community? Most of us wake up every day, eat breakfast, go through our usual work routine just to come home and eat dinner without a single thought of anything different. Some of us, however, wake up not knowing when or where our next meal will come. Solano County is not excluded in this situation. Behind the cities and landscapes, there is an abundance of people who cannot afford a sufficient meals for themselves. Impoverished families are facing devastating health conditions since their low wages cannot support themselves to live or eat. Even in the small agricultural land of Solano County, hunger is a severe problem that should not be overlooked.
In the span of a few months, I have had the privilege of helping with programs that work toward ending hunger in Northeastern Ohio. I worked at three places, and they all have a great impact on the community they serve. Working with the people there, I gained a better understanding of how people become food insecure and how important these programs are. The kindness I was shown is astonishing, and being shown this affection made me build strong emotional connections to those I was helping. Volunteering at these centers gave me a lot of hope that diminishing hunger insecurity is possible.
Food wasting, hunger, climate change, all of these contribute to the need to understand the preposterous point of throwing away food when we believe it is not needed, when there is so many ways “extra” food can help other cities and even countries with their hunger issue. We have reached to believe it is simply not our problem most of the time and just pushing the subject under the rug, if we do not address the topic of world hunger more seriously, I feel as though we are contributing to the death count and the abomination that food wasting causes on our planet and to our fellow people. That is what Food foolish by John M. Mandyck and Eric B. Schultz is trying to make any reader understand. Answer me this, you do not say no to your child
Education is a very powerful weapon, one that isn’t available to many however if it were, we could solve many issues within the world. The biggest and most fundamental problem which can be seen globally is, world hunger.The sad reality is that this is an issue and one that not many are talking about. In his article Frederic Seebohm proclaims that the world bank estimates “that there are now one billion absolute poor in the world” (Seebohm 5). He continues to define “absolute poor” as “those whose condition of life is so degraded by disease, illiteracy, malnutrition and squalor as to deny its victims basic human necessities” (4). The fact that there are so many hungry people in the world today is mind-boggling when you think about it. We are well into the 21st century. We now have the ability to communicate instantaneously with people all over the world. The collected knowledge of humanity, is literally at our fingertips via smartphones in our hands. Now some may assume that world hunger is still a grave issue simply because there is not enough food to feed everyone. However recently scientists who have studied world hunger, have found that the world produces more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet.The main cause of worldwide hunger is poverty. As R. C. Pickett mentions the “ the world has at present 1.5 billion hectares of arable land that remains uncultivated”(31). The problem isn’t that there isn’t enough land, the issue remains with the coordination of food production. Millions of people around the world are simply too poor to buy food. They also lack the monetary resources to grow their own food, such as the means to harvest, process, and store food.The interaction of domestic animals within the cropping systems needs to be intensively revaluated. A solution that Pickett suggests includes “governments and businesses interacting to provide a favorable price and availability structure of the necessary inputs for adequate production, and to supply needed economical processing, storage, transport, and utilization systems” (32). His solution is to aim more government intervention as he believes that much more food could be produced at least in certain areas but is not, simply because there is no
People have been taking action on solving the world issue of hunger and poverty since the 1900s, ever since poverty could be recognized in society, hungry people have been present. The issues within hunger have been failing farmers and malnutritioned women and children.Farmers around the world have been losing their productivity rates and haven't been able to grow nearly as much food as they have before.