The Rotten Damage of Food Waste
Growing up, children were most likely told to always finish all the food on their plates because somewhere else in the world, another child was starving. Most kids never really understand how serious the matter actually is and it is expected for adults to know better but here we are in 2016 where roughly one third of food produced is wasted every year. The problem with this is that about 21,000 people die per day from starvation, but where is that food they need to live? It’s rotting in the fridge, it’s being used for contests to see who can eat the fastest, or it’s simply been thrown away because the sun has gone down and people refuse to buy it the following day if it’s not new. What’s even more depressing is that most starvation deaths are of children.
The first problem here is poverty. How can someone work when they’re so hungry and sick? How can someone get a job they’re too sick to work? It’s bad enough that a child would die of starvation, but if the father or mother dies of starvation, then the whole family could die too due to the fact that there’s no one to go to work. Not many people step up to help the hungry child because they have their own family to think about. This isn’t to say that no one notices starving countries because it’s more than likely that everyone has seen the commercials on tv of children in different countries running around while the narrator explains how anyone can help by simply donating maybe five dollars.
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
Every day an estimated 24,000 people die from hunger or hunger related causes. Three-fourths of these deaths are children under the age of five. One may wonder how this can be living in a country were it seems so much food is wasted everyday. Food restaurants and grocery stores throw away food every night before closing. Many Americans waste food every day within their own homes. With so much “left over” food in America, how is it that an estimated 800 million people around the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition?
A. How many of you are worried about where your next meal will come from? Are you unsure of how you’re going to purchase next week’s groceries or what you will be feeding your children for dinner tonight? This probably isn’t something most of you think about from day to day. When you are hungry, you eat. It’s easy for you to grab a sandwich, order a pizza, or run through the drive thru when you are on the go. However, there are many families, not just in other countries, but here in the United States as well, that are going hungry every day. According to kidshealth.org, a child dies from malnutrition and related causes every 6 seconds.
It was difficult to read that countless millions of federal dollars and many of our country's most successful efforts to halt the spread of childhood hunger and starvation have recently been withdrawn. And as a result, this problem of childhood hunger is not getting better but is actually getting worse. The most recent estimates compiled by the USDA in 1999 indicate that 36.2 million Americans live in food-insecure households, which means that their access to adequate and safe food is limited or uncertain. This too is very disturbing information.
Johnny gets home from school and makes his way straight to the kitchen. He is hungry and wants a quick, yummy snack, but when he opens up the fridge, there is nothing there. Now he has to wait until his mom brings home dinner at six o'clock. Can you imagine what it would be like to experience this every day? Unbelievable, right? Well, for many children and families, this is their reality. What could possibly cause this, what are the effects, and what are people doing to help these poor families? A large number of children do not have access to fresh and nutritious food, due to lack of supermarkets or living on food stamps. This lack of healthy food can affect childhood development immensely and can lead to obesity and other diseases. Many people are doing what they can to help, like opening community gardens, connecting farms, restaurants, and hotels with food banks, and organizing food drives.
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
Most people in the United States today are unaware of the increasing numbers of child hunger throughout the country. Today, a staggering one in five kids struggle with hunger in our own country (Francisco 18). Not only does it affect their concentration and grades in school, but also their overall health. Over 1.02 billion people in the world are considered to be malnourished, and hunger and malnutrition is the leading cause of child deaths, which accounts for 6 million children each year (Nah and Chau). When most people think of children and families going hungry, they think that it is just a problem in other countries. However, there is an increasing amount of children and their families in North Carolina
Hunger in America happens every year to homeless people,kids, and adults,as sad as it is even new born babies. This could happen to anyone why? There is several reasons maybe some people don’t have the money. What if you were that person how would you live knowing that your child isn’t getting proper nutrition? Many people don’t seem to realize how much this really happens. one in 7 people in the United States face trying and struggling to get food to eat, and more than 12 million American family’s face hunger. Food insecurity is harmful to all people, but it is especially devastating to children. Proper nutrition is what a child’s needs to help with their development or you can say growing. Did you know that while hunger is nonstop - African
Every person in America is guilty of this almost daily in some way or another, and that is wasting food by either letting it rot in your refrigerator, taking too much at dinner and throwing what is left into the garbage for some varmint to rummage through later, or even in the production process by throwing away a perfectly good potato because it doesn’t meet the size requirement for processing. In America, it’s something we don’t think about; rather it’s just a habit that causes us to lose money on that wasted food. Something we seem to forget about, however, is the fact that there are starving people in other parts of the world that could have benefitted from that. Contrariwise, American’s are not the only ones that can be accused of
Anna Quindlen wrote this essay to persuade Americans to help stop the problem of child hunger. In the text Anna Quindlen says, “we Americans like need that takes place far from home, so we can feel simultaneously self-congratulatory and safe from the possibility that times could be lurking around the corner.” By this quote she means you’ll never know when your going to wake up & go through a struggle of surviving. You’d rather be safe than sorry because problems occur at any moment. She also states that, “the Agriculture Department estimated in 1999 that twelve-million children were hungry or at risk of going hungry.” Since then, there’s been more children in the U.S. that’s going through the same thing. Over the years the stats of child hunger are going up. More & more kids go hungry daily. However, she wants to have people help change
Now, more than ever, people are wasteful of the one thing we require most; food. We dispose of food at such a rate that it literally becomes waste which others
Envision the intriguing aromas and aspects of all the delectable, appetizing, and savory foods the world has to offer. Now imagine those foods being taken, scarcely eaten, and then banished to a life in the trash thereafter, where they cannot be consumed anymore. Now proceed to think about all of the resources, time, effort, and money that goes into producing food, it all would have been for nothing. Discarding edible food leads to billions of dollars of food lost, along with creating additional trash. Consumers can do simple things to create less food waste.
“Some kids don’t get enough to eat, no matter what people tell themselves,” says Anna Quindlen on the topic of child hunger. In the United States child hunger is not as major as it is in other countries but, that doesn’t mean that is doesn’t exist. The problem of child hunger is virtually ignored in first world countries like the U.S. because of how increasingly worse it is in many third world countries such as Africa. Anna notices this problem and wishes to educate others on the topic and inform the reader on the problem.
There are billions of people struggling every day to have enough to eat, and billions of tons of food being tossed in the garbage, food waste is gaining increasing awareness as a serious environmental and economic issue. Research shows that about 60 million metric tons of food is wasted a year in the United States, with an estimated value of $162 billion. About 32 million tons of it end up in landfills, at a cost of about $1.5 billion a year to local government this economic crisis is worldwide! My research estimates that a third of all the food produced in the world is never consumed, and the total cost of that food waste could be as high as $400 billion a year. The food discarded by retailers and consumers in the most developed countries would be more than enough to feed all of the world’s hungry people, but it is not just those countries that have problems with food waste, it is also an issue in African countries like South Africa. The problem is expected to grow worse as the world’s population increases, unless actions are taken to reduce the waste. Food waste is not only a social cost, but it contributes to growing environmental problems like global warming, experts say, with the production of food consuming vast quantities of water, fertilizer and land. The fuel that is burned to process, refrigerate and transport it also adds to the environmental cost. Most food waste is thrown away in landfills, where it decomposes and emits methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Because of the way the world presents poverty, poor people are often looked down on and blamed for the situations they are in and are labelled as lazy and unskilled. This makes it very hard for many of them to find jobs, thus they cannot get out of the povertous place they are in. Many of these people cannot afford the necessities of living and this includes food. Close to 21,000 people die worldwide because of hunger or hunger-related causes (poverty.com). Sadly, most of these deaths are children.