A Dictionary.com definition of the word “hunger” is: “a shortage of food; famine.” As someone who is growing up in the middle-class and who has grown accustomed to going to sporting events and going on expensive family vacations, I’ve never really known what life is like outside of my world. I only ever thought the word “hunger” meant anything other than “wanting food," I never really thought about hunger on a larger scale. I didn’t know that 66 million young children attend classes hungry , and I certainly didn’t know that one in nine people on Earth don’t have enough food to enjoy a healthy life. One in nine. In my (roughly) 20 person English class, that’s two people.
It’s hard to imagine what hunger feels like. Whenever I feel “hungry,” I simply go to my refrigerator or my pantry and get a snack. If I’m lucky, my mom will take me to Chick-Fil-A or Chipotle. However, for a lot of other people, it’s not that easy. It’s hard to think about people not having food. Food is such a common thing for my friends and me. If I’m hanging out with one of my friends who doesn’t live close to me, we’ll usually meet somewhere for lunch or dinner. If I’m at the movies with my mom, we never fail to get popcorn. I hate that it’s so difficult to imagine life without constantly eating. What if people didn’t need to eat? Society would be so different. Unfortunately, people do need to eat; and a lot of people who need to eat aren’t eating.
Every morning while I eat breakfast, my mom and I watch the Today Show. Yesterday, they showed a campaign they were doing to raise money for a charity called Feeding America, a charity that provides food to hungry Americans. They’re selling shirts that say “Like You” on them, and all the proceeds go to Feeding America. Immediately after the segment ended, my mom said “Alright, where can I get one?” It really made me think; what if everyone was as willing to help support charities that deal with world hunger as my mom was? Would there be as many hungry people out there? The 100 million underweight children in developing countries shouldn’t be underweight, and if people continued to raise money and awareness towards world hunger, maybe they won’t be.
