Written By: Christie A.
When we talk about hunger, there are three ways we can talk about it:
Malnutrition: When a person doesn’t get the nutrients needed to grow and thrive. This can be not enough food, but most of the time it’s because of empty calories, meaning there are calories, but no nutrition. Think about if all you could eat was potato chips. They have plenty of calories, but it doesn’t have protein, vitamins or minerals. Your body can’t survive on just potato chips very long because you need nutrition.
Famine: This is widespread food scarcity. Meaning there isn’t enough food someplace to feed people. What if you had 10 friends and everyone was hungry, but only 6 sandwiches. There’s not enough food for everyone to get full.
Starvation: This happens when you don’t have enough food for a long time. You will lose more and more weight until finally, your body can’t keep going.
Fast Fact About Hunger
In Africa, there are 257 million hungry people
In Asia, there are 385.3 million hungry people. According to the UN, that is more than 60% of the world’s hungry.
In Southeast Asia, 43.4 million children are underweight.
Hunger in the US affects millions of people, but hunger in the US looks very different than in Africa or Asia. Most people in the US won’t die from starvation or malnutrition, but almost 15% of the US population is “food insecure” meaning they don’t know where their next meal will come from. That means that 18 million children in the US live in food-insecure households. Another group that is greatly affected by food insecurity is the elderly, right now there are about 5.3 million food-insecure elderly.
There are approximately 42.5 million hungry people in South America.
Right now in the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex, 1 in 4 children don’t have enough food to eat.
Covid-19 is affecting all of these numbers and causing hunger to rapidly grow.
It is estimated that now 1 in 10 globally are hungry, and that number continues to rise. At the end of the day, food is a very basic need for people and by helping to feed people you can make their lives a whole lot better.
