#89, March 20, 2002
I'm hungry. I haven't eaten
in well over a day. That's a long time for someone who eats every couple of
hours. I'm fasting. I want to remember what it feels like to be hungry. I want
to understand how hungry I would have to be to sell one of my sons.
A week ago, I read a news
story of a starving Afghan man who traded two of his sons for a supply of
wheat. The entire family had been eating grass. It's bad enough being hungry,
far worse to have little hope for a meal - but to have hunger gnaw through the
bond between you and your child?
When you are used to eating
three squares a day, every day after day, hunger can be a secondary issue. When
polled about the critical needs of our time, we might easily answer
"stopping terrorism," or "tax cuts," or even "filling
potholes." But when the stomach growls for food and no answer comes, you
begin to wonder. After a day, you've little doubt that it's more important to
ensure that the belly of every child gets its fill of good food.
In your hunger, you might
challenge the myths that perpetuate hunger, the foremost being that there isn't
enough food to go around. The problem is primarily that the hungry cannot
afford to pay for it. Those with the money have meat-heavy diets. Their demand
for beef directs the grains and beans into feedlots where it fattens the
cattle. Feedlot beef cattle are terribly inefficient, converting to air and
water pollution over 90 percent of the food value of what they eat.
Famines and natural
disasters account for a small percentage of hunger worldwide. If there were
equitable distribution of wealth and food, these disasters could be buffered by
storing food from good times. But crop and harvest failures are increasing, and
you don't have to look far for the causes. Wars destroy crops and drive people
from their lands. Then there is the weather, which is becoming increasingly
irregular as the global temperature increases. (As I write this, Congress
rejected increasing auto fuel efficiency standards, paving the way for more
"global burning" from greenhouse gas emissions and wars driven by our
demand for oil - Iraq, the Balkans, Iraq, etc.)
Then there are domestic and
international policies that favor the concentration of land into ownership by
big corporations and local autocratic elite. There are IMF and World Bank
policies that are forcing privatization (read "piratization") of
water supplies; corrupt third world governments that promote conversion of
subsistence agriculture (read "indigenous independence") to economies
based on export cash crops like sugar cane and coffee (read "feudal
servitude"); and gene-pool contamination and patenting that robs native
farmers of the seeds their ancestors developed over the centuries.
In my hunger, I'll be
blunt: the biggest cause of hunger is greed and ignorance among the wealthy
nations, and the pathological apathy that tolerates it.
The same day I read about
the Afghan grass eaters, I read another food story. A Rohnert Park man with his
wife and two children were at the checkout stand with $300 of groceries. When
the machine was having problems with the man's ATM card, a stranger stepped
forward and paid for them. She said, "Trust in God. He'll take care of
you." She then gave one of the children 50 cents to buy a plastic-egg
novelty from a vending machine, and left. The mom helped her son open opened
the egg, to find a silver crucifix inside.
Christians, Easter is just
over a week away. Is there a better way to worship the sacrifice of Jesus than
to change our lives so that the children, and the earth, may live? Like getting
a smaller car, and using it sparingly. Eating low on the food chain. Setting
aside time to learn about and fight corporate imperialism. Enjoying the simple
pleasures.
I'm not going to sell my
children, or anyone else's. I'm curbing my appetite for the hurtful stuff I
don't really need. But I sure need this vegetarian burrito. God bless it.