the world and I
I didn’t realize how far I was removed from reality until I read The Hunger Games. It jolted me into doing some research. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates for 2010, there are about 925-million hungry people in the world. That means 13.6 percent of the world population, or almost 1 in 7 people regularly experience hunger.
bread of life
I’ve never known true, life-threatening hunger. There have been occasions where my stomach gnawed for food and where I felt the ragged edge of hunger pains. I’ve never known, however, the kind of hunger you see when you visit slums in Sierra Leone or refugee camps in the Sudan. That hunger is palpable in a place where people are barely…
i am hunger
In a previous article, I wrote about four severely malnourished siblings that I have been daily feeding. The children—Joshua, Mirika, Ashaba, Katseme— look drastically different now that they’ve been receiving nutritious food on a regular basis. Their stomachs are no longer bloated and their skin is no longer covered with sores. And their hair is no longer falling out in…
our daily bread
Both the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Program report that 1.02 billion people (15 percent of the world population) went to bed hungry in 2009. Every day, 18,000 children under the age of 5 die from hunger-related causes—one child every 5 seconds. The urgent cry of these 1.02 billion people is, “Give us today the…
all shall be well
Between natural disasters leveling wide swaths of crops and inflation dramatically skyrocketing prices, even subsistence foods like rice or beans have been pushed almost out of reach for many in developing economies. In response to the estimated one million North Koreans who starved to death in the late 1990s, government researchers have been working to develop a noodle that "delays…
Jesus-food
My wife Miska and I have two young boys, Wyatt (5) and Seth (4). They can, of course, be a bit picky about their food. They often tell us, with groans suggesting they are at death's edge, "I am soooo hungry." However, they regularly rebuff healthy choices we offer (grapes, pretzels, bananas with soy butter) with scowling, wrinkled faces. What…
