Think Before You Eat




Don’t you just love the feeling of sitting down and eating a nice meal, and the feeling of being full afterwards? Have you ever looked down and seen that there is a lot of food on your plate but didn’t care because you were just too full?

               According to “Love Food, Hate Waste” the average American wastes about 1 pound of food per day. This is something that I find disturbing after reading from the book “Stuffed and Starved”. This book really highlighted to me that America is one of the most over-weight societies and talks about how we are consuming twice the amount of food that we actually need. This bothers me because it also talks about all the countries that struggle to feed one person let alone their whole family.

              

 Whenever I am in my schools local cafeteria there is an area that you put all of your plates and bowls so they can be cleaned. Most of those plates and bowls are still piled high with foods that are just going to waste without any thought. Also, at the end of the day there is always a ton of left over food in which they completely just throw away. To me, it makes me upset to think that all these people can enjoy a nice buffet style meal and just throw away piles of food, while there are probably people in the local community that may not be eating that night.

               I had read in a magazine about a group of people who visit local restaurants and super markets that are throwing away food that has either not been eaten for the night or things from the super market that are still good to eat but are required to be taken off the shelves, and gone around the city and gave these left over foods to homeless people who didn’t have a meal that day. I believe this idea should be on a much wider scale.

               Whenever I was a kid I always heard from my parents that I need to eat everything on my plate and not to waste anything because there was someone out there who would love to be able to eat a good meal. This is something that a lot of people probably heard when they were little and really never thought much of it. I think that there are a lot of people in America that are naive to the fact that millions of people are starving every night. I feel that this issue should become a bigger topic and inform people about what is going on out there and maybe it will help you the next time you decide to completely fill your plate up or whenever you are about to throw away perfectly good food.

               Going to sleep hungry is an issue that many people deal with and I feel that not everyone could be helped by doing some of these solutions but a large portion of it could which would make a lot of difference. To find out ways to help you can visit NoKidHungry.org

money.usnews.com

dining.ucdavis.edu/documents/FoodWaste-nov.09.pdf
Stuffed and Starved, Raj Patel, Melville House Publishing,