Yesterday, after a luxurious afternoon in Stratford with Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, St. Jacob’s Stone Crock turkey buffet never looked more delicious. In fact, I am still bloated from succulent turkey, creamy mashed potatoes, garden-fresh peas and carrots, home-baked bread slathered in real—real—butter, a modest helping of gravy (unwise for the lactose intolerant) and a triple-threat dessert: pumpkin and lemon meringue pie and a scoopful of peach cobbler.
Sinful, really, but always comforting to people who, like me, grew up on the edge of starvation.
Still, I have had decades to recoup my losses which, judging by my girth, I have done admirably. I do not stint when it comes to second helpings, an over-abundance of carbohydrates or a late afternoon Pepsi. While I know the multiple challenges faced by overweight people, I have not yet learned how to push myself away from the table. This is what childhood starvation does: a person always feels hungry, even when she’s full.
Today is Blog Action Day and this year’s theme, as you can undoubtedly guess, is food. While I could write at length about the subtle and less-than-subtle effects of (physical = emotional = psychological) starvation, I have learned that there is only one way, if there is any way at all, to help make a difference: being direct.
- Approximately 815 million people worldwide are undernourished, with over 16,000 children dying per day from hunger-related causes.
- In the Asian, African and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called "absolute poverty."
- Every year 15 million children die of hunger.
- For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for 5 years.
- Throughout the 1990s more than 100 million children will die [have died] from illness and starvation. Those 100 million deaths could [have] be[en] prevented for the price of ten Stealth bombers, or what the world spends on its military in two days.
- The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed and one-third is starving. Since you've entered this site at least 200 people have died of starvation. Over four million will die this year.
- One in twelve people worldwide is malnourished, including 160 million children under the age of five. United Nations Food and Agriculture
- The Indian subcontinent has nearly half the world's hungry people. Africa and the rest of Asia together have approximately 40%, and the remaining hungry people are found in Latin America and other parts of the world. Hunger in Global Economy
- Nearly one in four people, 1.3 billion—a majority of humanity—live on less than $1 per day, while the world's 358 billionaires have assets exceeding the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world's people. UNICEF
- Three billion people in the world today struggle to survive on US$2/day.
- In 1994 the Urban Institute in Washington DC estimated that one out of six elderly people in the U.S. has an inadequate diet.
- In the U.S. hunger and race are related. In 1991, 46% of African-American children were chronically hungry, and 40% of Latino children were chronically hungry compared to 16% of white children.
- The infant mortality rate is closely linked to inadequate nutrition among pregnant women. The U.S. ranks 23rd among industrial nations in infant mortality. African-American infants die at nearly twice the rate of white infants.
- One out of every eight children under the age of twelve in the U.S. goes to bed hungry every night.
- Half of all children under five years of age in South Asia and one third of those in sub-Saharan Africa are malnourished.
- In 1997 alone, the lives of at least 300,000 young children were saved by vitamin A supplementation programmes in developing countries.
- Malnutrition is implicated in more than half of all child deaths worldwide—a proportion unmatched by any infectious disease since the Black Death.
- About 183 million children weigh less than they should for their age.
- To satisfy the world's sanitation and food requirements would cost only US$13 billion--what the people of the United States and the European Union spend on perfume each year.
- The assets of the world's three richest men are more than the combined GNP of all the least developed countries on the planet.
- Every 3.6 seconds someone dies of hunger.
- It is estimated that some 800 million people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition, about 100 times as many as those who actually die from it each year.
Taken from http://library.thinkquest.org/C002291/high/present/stats.htm
Statistics, however, aren’t always enough of a reminder that we are not doing, or giving, our share. I, for example, am not always as moved by statistics—where human lives are reduced to numbers and equations and where it therefore becomes that much easier to slough off personal responsibility—as I ought to be.
But put me face-to-face with a human story and I am often guided to my better self.
I think now of a woman I met in the mid-1990s...a nurse who, in her mid-sixties, had come back from Rwanda to Canada for cataract surgery. She was in Ottawa at the clinic where I worked (it was my job to measure the length of her eyes so that accurately-sized implant lenses could be ordered) at a time not long after the Rwandan 100-day genocide had eradicated close to 800,000 lives (about 20% of the country’s population), its remaining citizens left struggling to survive.
I sat there facing her, unable to accurately imagine what life would be like in Rwanda, and I felt shame because I knew, and had asked, so little.
The woman leaned over the A-scan machine and touched my arm, anxious to know how long the surgery and recovery time would take, in a hurry to return to her work, which, if I am pressed to compare, seemed more like com/passion…an obsession to do whatever she could to save lives.
I sat there, taken with this woman who, clearly past retirement age, was so eager and still able to perform the harrowing task she described:
She slept five or six hours a night in a hut
and spent the other eighteen hours standing behind a table, where she sorted and selected and doled out bits of food to the mostly orphaned children,
many of whom, she said, died before making their way to the front of the line.
I sat there horrified.
It is one thing to live without sustainable amounts of nourishment—my school friends were often spiriting me lunches, and sometimes my father would drive over to the schoolyard to sneak me some change—but I was dumb-stricken by the notion—the reality—that children at the back end of a line would never make it to the front.
For a second, in fact, I wanted not to believe her. I wanted to believe that I lived in a world where people wouldn’t let this happen; where, singly and collectively, we would be moved, at the very least, to make waves. I wanted to believe that I lived in a world where I, a well-fed woman of forty, was not only better informed, but had equipped myself to make a difference.
But I had done nothing. I hadn’t even bothered to know.
I will always remember this woman, her eyes shining despite the milk-white hue of her cataract eyes, and I will always be grateful to her for sharing her world with me and for gently helping me realize that there was something I ought to be doing to help.
So here it is, a few years later, and I am wondering what else, what more, I can do, we can all do, to help stop world hunger. And really, in this, I already know.
Imagine, for example, if all of those already wealthy Hollywood actors donated the money they make in the name of having their names on a bottle of perfume; if working adults gave one percent of their income to assist people in poverty, or if every Canadian citizen donated one dollar per week…imagine what we could do.
We could still line up at holiday buffet tables and heap on extra helpings of potatoes. We could drool over a pizza commercial and order out for an extra large. And even though we shouldn’t, we might sneak in an extra weekend-Pepsi or two.
We can’t all be the example of this magnanimous nurse who gave up her time and her life so that others could live.
And yet the cost is no more than a newspaper a week; a half-cup of coffee; three-quarters of an apple. The cost is no more than whatever we choose it to be…minor, miniscule, unnoticed.
If we do not take it upon ourselves to feed the hungry, we are no better than, and in fact are the people, who keep the poor hungry.
Today is Blog Action Day and the subject is food.
Invite the world to your table.
