Food For Thought

If I could change one thing to make our world a better place, I would make sure that every person on this earth has enough food to live a healthy life. 

I know this is a somewhat cliche choice, but as I was considering all the things in the world that I wanted to fix, nothing seemed quite as pressing as this. The knowledge that so many people in this world are starving every day is a fact that I have never been able to wrap my head around. Even as a child it always nagged at me. With such a large supply of food in the world, why are there so many people without it? 

Food is a necessity for life; without it we die. Most of us that live a comfortable life with a constant supply of food often take that for granted, and we are often quite wasteful as well. I am guilty of this as well, I will not pretend otherwise. The greatest food waste, however, comes from restaurants and grocery stores. I witnessed this firsthand when I started my first job at a restaurant.  Every night when we closed, we would dump any cooked food that had not been sold into the garbage. And every night it killed me to throw out so much food. Often it was enough to feed a whole family, if not more. If I had the choice I would have taken it to the nearest homeless shelter, but it was against company policy to do this.

My solution to this is to make it mandatory that all restaurants and grocery stores be required to package and donate all extra food to the nearest homeless shelter. To help enforce this, any business that is found disposing of the food should be fined. If we implement this rule across the world, it could greatly reduce the number of people going hungry in many communities. This solution will only work for the communities with a large number of businesses, since the food will perish quickly and can only be transported to nearby areas. 

So, on a global scale, we must work on transporting food to locations that cannot grow the food for themselves. With the technology we have today, we should be able to easily transport produce all over the world. Additionally, we can help create new methods that improve farming in areas that are capable of it, and maybe even make it possible to farm on land that was once not capable of it. 

While these solutions may not be enough to completely rid the world of hunger, I do believe that this would be a very good place to start. If everyone gave just a little bit of time or money, we could greatly reduce the number of deaths due to hunger. As human beings we should all do our best to make our world a better place to live in for everyone.