Hungry

Sometimes I come across an item that reminds me of an old childhood memory. I found this article about the book "Hungry Planet" by Peter Menzel. It's photos from all around the world of families surrounded by their weekly grocery purchases. It reminded of Brooklyn, nights eating white rice with a fried egg for dinner. And from the dark, deep, hidden place in my brain pan it reminded me of welfare food. The welfare food we would get as monthly staples. YUCK! Large cans of peanut butter, big one pound blocks of butter, powdered milk, powdered potato's and the ever scary extra large can of chipped beef. Chipped beef ... what the fuck, it looked ominous even in the can. (Perhaps that is where my distaste for beef comes from.) Now that I think about it, having white rice with a fried egg was actually tasty compared to chipped beef or worse, not eating at all.

The pictures from Menzel's book are an amazing glimpse into what people spend on food and what they buy. Family budgets ranging from $500.00 a week to $1.23 a week. Imagine $1.23 to feed your family. And I complain about the chipped beef of my childhood.

I am often surprised at the amount of food that goes to waste here on my island. Food grows on the side of the road all across this island. Food rots right where if grows. Yet people go hungry. I grow avocados, several types of bananas, pineapples, oranges, tangerines, grapefruit, plantains, all sorts of root vegetables, mangoes, lemons, star fruit, sour sop, and papayas. I never let a visitor leave without giving them some fruit to go. I share with the neighbors. I bring extra fruit and veggies to the baseball park and let strangers take what they want. Seeing fresh fruit go to waste scares me.

I remember being hungry, and what it felt like to be a kid and watch others enjoy special treats, salivating and imagining what it must taste like, what it must feel like to go out and just buy whatever you felt like eating, whenever you felt like eating it. What freedom. Life being the incredible adventure that it is has allowed me to now be that person, you know the one that can buy what she wants when she wants. What freedom. I can choose to eat anything and pay whatever. Yet people go hungry and I sometimes feel guilty. Even more guilty now after reading "The Hungry Planet".

• More than 840 million people in the world are malnourished — 799 million of them live in the developing world
• More than 153 million of the world's malnourished people are children under the age of 5.
• Six million children under the age of 5 die every year as a result of hunger.
• Malnutrition can severely affect a child's intellectual development. Malnourished children often have stunted growth and score significantly lower on math and language achievement tests than do well-nourished children.
• Lack of dietary diversity and essential minerals and vitamins also contributes to increased child and adult mortality. Vitamin A deficiency impairs the immune system, increasing the annual death toll from measles and other diseases by an estimated 1.3 million-2.5 million children.
• While every country in the world has the potential of growing enough food to feed itself, 54 nations currently do not produce enough food to feed their populations, nor can they afford to import the necessary commodities to make up the gap. Most of these countries are in sub-Saharan Africa.
• Most of the widespread hunger in a world of plenty results from grinding, deeply rooted poverty. In any given year, however, between 5 and 10 percent of the total can be traced to specific events: droughts or floods, armed conflict, political, social and economic disruptions.

So when you see me at Starbucks buying a venti iced caramel macchiato and complaining about the cost of imported extra virgin olive oil, feel free to tell me to shut the fuck up.