World Hunger Series: Part I
Imagine you’re sitting on your couch late at night and you get a craving for some snacks. You go over to your fridge and there’s nothing that interests you. You’re somewhat disappointed and go back to the couch or straight to bed. It’s an unpleasant feeling isn’t it?
Now imagine not having a fridge to begin with and no idea where the next meal is going to come from or what it’s going to be. At this point you don’t even care about hygiene and you go for whatever you can in order to survive.
There are many ways and indexes to show world hunger statistics and the numbers keep changing but all you need to know is this,
Approximately 821 million people go to bed on an empty stomach each night.
Thats more than double the population of the United States! Yet, not enough work is being done to curb these numbers. We often think that only people like Bill Gates or Asim Premji can make a difference but that is not true. The impact each and everyone of us together can make is larger than any philanthropists or NGOs working to do the same.
The most basic and easiest way to play our part is by reducing food wastage.
More than 600 million tonnes of food is wasted in the world each year. This is enough to feed 821 million people 4 times over. Startups all over the world are working on ways to help reduce food wastage. By monitoring the amount of food we actually consume, we can plan and purchase the exact amount of food we consume on a weekly or monthly basis. Another option is to consume food in a way that the leftovers can be donated to the less fortunate.
There are so many more ways to reduce food waste and we will be publishing more solutions on the Billion Moonshots publication in this ongoing series focused on World Hunger.
