Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Blog Action Day

Today is Blog Action Day. The topic this year is poverty.

Many have written about many different things, but let's take a moment to consider how poverty affects humanity's ability to satisfy one of the few critical needs: food. No, I'm not talking about GMO-free food, nor am I talking about trans fat free food, nor am I talking about sugar-free cookies. I'm talking about the staples -- I'm talking about sustenance.


BBC: World hunger


I'm talking about how our ability and desire to pay more for food and siphon away food to create fuel is contributing to already soaring food prices. The world population is expected to grow from close to 6 billion today to approximately 9 billion by 2050. (Source: BBC/UN) The FAO estimates that 75m of those who are hungry are hungry because of high food prices.

And we're still wasting food. According to this CNN article that cites the US FDA, approximately one-quarter or 25.9 million tons of food winds up in garbage cans all over America. So how about this -- how about one week of consuming everything you buy?

Would that be too hard?