How “hunger” is a curable epidemic
Every time we are served food, in every religion, there is one or the other custom to express gratitude for our fortune. It is an ancient gesture, perhaps born in the times when food was scarce and people dying of hunger was as common as someone catching a cold today. Often, we don’t stop to wonder if these conditions are still present today. Amidst all the technology, the fight over political correctness, the prevalent consumerism, capitalism, and globalization, one would think that a negligible number of people must be hungry. After all, all the celebrities, and the UN, and the numerous international organisations have got them covered, right?
Wrong.
Hunger is still one of the biggest diseases in the world. And it is still growing.
Since no one really likes to read about disheartening statistics at length, I will do the work and summarize things for you, dear readers.
According to a report published by the World Health Organization in September 2018, 821 Million people are hungry in the world. There are about 7.7 billion people overall. That means, 10.8% of the world is hungry. To put it into perspective, about one in nine people are hungry.
This number has only been growing in the past years. WHO says that in the past three years, this number has risen continuously, taking the number of hungry people back to the number from a decade ago which had hit an all-time low after a considerable effort.
Estimates show that every 5 seconds, one child dies of hunger or hunger-related causes. 45% of deaths of children under five are due to hunger. Far more children are malnourished or are barely surviving.
In India itself, 2 million people will go to bed hungry tonight. One out of three children in our country are stunted. This means that they are not as developed physically or mentally, as they ought to be at their age. Even today, there are people dying of hunger in our country itself.
The terrible tragedy of the fact is that this issue is completely preventable. We, ourselves, can save these innocent lives.
According to the United Nations Development Program, 40% of food produced in India is wasted. The same happens with 50% of food produced worldwide.
While our average is numerically lower than the world average, the sheer volume of our population means that India wastes as much food as the United Kingdom consumes.
The food in our dustbins could feed an entire country.
According to a column published in 2018 by The Indian Express, it is noted how the assumption amongst a certain section of our country is that no one can die of hunger in the “land of plenty”. Hunger related deaths are often written off as regular illnesses. When a 58-year old woman died in Jharkhand, a similar scenario was observed. The blame game was played effectively, the media was outraged at the mention of “starvation” and the ruling party did their best to prove that it was something else. The same thing happened to 11-year old Santoshi, in 2017. The officials claimed illness but neighbours and families kept repeating themselves: they had nothing to eat. They had nothing to eat and were denied rations while tonnes of wheat and rice rot away in storage every year.
It is important to note that 25% of the freshwater used during cooking is wasted even as millions of people suffer from an acute water crisis. The world produces enough food to feed twice the world’s population. Still, there are 821 million people hungry, one child in five seconds dies, and one-third of the children in our country are malnourished.
There are several things that can be done to reduce food wastage; both at the personal and organizational level:
Redistribute leftovers. Parties and weddings always have leftover food afterwards. There are several NGOs dedicated to preserving and redistributing this food to the needy. Feeding India is one such NGO. A quick Google search will reveal countless others.
Stop throwing out food that you don’t like. Taste is not bigger than hunger, and every time you dump a plateful of food into the dustbin because it wasn’t prepared the way you would have liked, you are ensuring that one meal is taken away from a poor person. Do not fill up your plate at parties just because the food is free. .Every bit of samosa, momo, chowmein, burger, pizza or pasta that you throw away is a morsel that you snatched away from the mouth of a hungry child with money only to throw it in the dustbin.
Move the rulers. Implore the government to release rations stored in granaries and cold-storages. Millions of tonnes of food items get eaten away by pests or simply rot in government storage.
And lastly, talk about hunger. Spread the word. Stop your family and friends from wasting food. Sensitize them, sensitize yourself. Learn and teach how to effectively store and preserve food every day.
Most importantly, do your bit.
Every time you waste food, there are a million people who would fight to the death for the one bite left at the bottom of the dustbin. Our greed and callousness have killed 18.8 million people this year, as I write this. Somebody’s loved one is now only a statistic, a tally mark. That mark could have been you had it not been for a stroke of luck.
Here are some moving pieces I found on the topic and used as resources. I suggest you have a look if time permits:
