Hunger Articles

Of all the information present in the articles on hunger, what I found most interesting was the statement made that hunger kills more people every year than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. Diseases such as AIDS have no known cure; a diagnoses is certain death. However, hunger is not incurable. In fact, the resources used to cure hunger (food, obviously) is so overwhelmingly present in my life that I often throw food away without a second thought. When I was a child my grandmother always told me to eat all my food because there were children starving all over the world. While that argument seems stupid to me now (really, how is my food going to help them?), it has become obvious that food distribution, not food availability is the factor killing people in poverty. Everyday I hear of scientific studies to find cures for AIDS, cancer, and other diseases that are currently fatal. Hunger is fatal as well, but there is a known cure. Why then, do I not hear of scientists studies to discover ways to distribute the food that is already produced. The task seems much easier than curing AIDS, and the problem is much more widespread. I think the answer has something to do with the state of American poverty. Poverty in the United States is much less a result of food distribution than poverty in other countries. With all the cheap food available at WalMart and McDonald's we find it hard to conceptualize that food just doesn't exist in the abundance and cheapness in other countries as it does in the United States. Therefore many Americans, including myself, will donate food to homeless shelters or money to humanitarian groups. However, very few are able to recognize the need to research a way to eliminate this problem rather than merely donate. In effect, it is a problem of knowledge. Most of us only know about foreign poverty through articles and tv reports, very few have been able to see it or experience it. This knowledge is too removed, and doesn't allow us to realize the correct way to cure the problem of foreign hunger.