"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense
than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." Martin Luther King, Jr.
According to the recent message from the San Francisco Bay Area Food Not Bombs and the World Hunger Education Service, as many as one in 7 households in the United States experiences hunger each day. Hunger, in this case, is referred to as food insecure: the uneasy or painful sensation caused by want of food and the exhausted condition that goes with it.
In 1997 The Department of Agriculture estimated that 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food produced in the United States went uneaten. Since then the rate has climbed, most of it is burned or put into landfills.
The call from the global Food Not Bombs movement holds that we can totally eradicate hunger in the United States by redirecting this food from the trash into hungry mouths. Food Not Bombs shares free vegan and vegetarian meals with the hungry in over 1,000 cities around the world to help end poverty and violence against people and nature.
The San Francisco Bay Area Food Not Bombs reminds us that an impoverished person is a person in crisis and a humanitarian society should take care of people in crisis, regardless of how that crisis came about. We have an obligation to nourish our impoverished citizens and we can feed them at no cost if we pass laws that mandate edible food be donated to share with the hungry. This is recycling at it's best and leads to a better, more fair and sustainable world.
Here is Shel Silverstein's poem Sharing
I'll share your toys, I'll share your money,
I'll share your toast, I'll share you honey,
I'll share your milk and your cookies too– –
The hard part's sharing mine with you.
