Hunger isn’t a word that any of us at this school have truly experienced. Most of the students here can afford food to eat to provide for their daily needs and those who don’t have programs to make sure they get fed. However, I fear that most people with this ability to buy or afford food are taking advantage of this power. As I give this speech, one ninth of the population around the world continue to starve or die from starvation. Yet, seeing that people throw away food that could help save lives, I don’t think many are aware of this. I’ve seen students here at Jackson toss away a whole sandwich because they weren’t hungry. I’ve seen people at restaurants take one bite out of a slice of cake and ask the waiter to dispose the rest because they didn’t like the taste. I’ve seen people dump a whole a box of fruit away just because one of them were rotten. Sometimes I, myself, discard food because of these reasons. But wasting food for these irresponsible excuses are unfair to the poor who can’t afford food like us. This injustice plays a huge role on world hunger.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the world wastes about 1.6 billion tons of food a day and 1.3 billion tons of this food have parts that are edible. Consumers in developed countries such as America, waste about 222 million tons of food out of this grand total. This number equals the amount of food some underdeveloped countries barely make. This means that we dissipate as much food as undeveloped countries, such as Ethiopia, produces in total. The food that we think is garbage could feed an entire country that is in need. Connecting to this, I also learned that about 21,000 people die from starvation every day from a website called poverty.com. This is about 1 death every 4 minutes but humans do nothing to help and waste food by the minute. Now picture if all this food from around the world wasn’t wasted and was given to the hungry, sure the food wouldn’t be in the best quality or brand new but, all the food that would be offered would be enough to prevent any deaths from happening and also feed millions of starving people in the process. The food we toss away that still have plenty of usable nutrients would be used for a purpose that is greater than rotting and being unusable at the bottom of a trash can.

To some of you, wasting food still may not seem like a big deal or maybe you were never even aware that you were doing it at all. How this happens is you think that other people waste more food than you and that you don’t waste anything at all. Based on this thought you through away food without even noticing. This judgement about other people is exactly the reason us as humans are less aware that we’re throwing away food because everyone thinks their better than others. But the hungry civilians don’t have time or care about what you think. People that starve today were born into a world with very little education and never had the opportunity to learn and earn money to provide themselves with food like we do. If everyone had these opportunities, world hunger wouldn’t be as big of a problem because everyone would have the same chance to attain food. However, that’s not the case. Imagine if you were poor, without knowledge to obtain money to provide yourself with food and you saw someone toss a half-eaten, still edible sandwich, into the garbage when you haven’t eaten in days. How would you feel? I would certainly feel mad seeing someone abandon a nutritious sandwich like they were too good for it while I needed it just to keep me barely alive. This feeling that everyone should feel if they were in that situation exemplifies that wasting food is unfair to those who never got a chance to earn it.

I ask all of you now after hearing this speech to realize that wasting food isn’t fair to the people who are in need of it and help by limiting what you throw away into the trash can like if you have a sandwich and aren’t hungry, give it to a friend or save it for later. If you have canned foods that you aren’t going to eat, donate it to a food drive. Help the starving by giving them food so maybe they don’t have to worry about it and focus more on getting jobs which can help our society as you help them. Next time you decide to throw edible food away think about who actually needs it, the trash or the hungry civilians?