Enid News & Eagle
Friday, July 15, 2011
A recently released report showed obesity rates did not fall in a single U.S. state last year and rose in 16 states. Twelve states have obesity rates of 30 percent or more, compared to just one four years ago.
Among adults, Oklahoma’s obesity rate has risen faster since 1995 than that of any other state. Today, Oklahoma’s obesity rate is seventh highest in the nation at 31 percent, while in 1995 it was 13 percent, which ranked 40th in the nation.
Why? Primarily because we eat too much, eat the wrong things and don’t get enough exercise.
But not everyone in our state is experiencing an overabundance of food. Oklahoma, in fact, continues to rank among the top five states in the country in terms of food insecurity, which befalls people who literally don’t know where their next meal is coming from.
The Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma, which collects and hands out food to help the needy, has increased its food distribution by 86 percent in the past four years and provides enough food to feed more than 90,000 people each week. That’s roughly the population of Broken Arrow.
Nationwide, the trend is the same. Roughly one in six Americans is dealing with hunger issues, with roughly 17 million households fighting food insecurity.
But we waste nearly as much food as we consume. A 2004 study of food production and consumption conducted by the University of Arizona found between 40 and 50 percent of all food ready for harvest in the United States is never eaten. Every year, in fact, we spend about a billion dollars just to dispose of food waste.
An Environmental Protection Agency study estimates Americans produce some 30 million tons of food waste annually.
A federal study estimated the average family of four in the United States throws out approximately 122 pounds of food each month.
And we are not alone. A study in Great Britain showed people there throw out a third of the food they buy, including four million apples, 1.2 million sausages and 2.8 million tomatoes. Swedish families with small children were found to discard about a quarter of the food they bought.
While we waste food, billions of people worldwide go hungry.
The next time you are tempted to heap more on your plate than you can eat, to toss out food rather than freezing it and later serving your family leftovers, to let produce spoil in your refrigerator’s crisper (which a friend sarcastically but accurately refers to as a “rotter”), to eat half your meal in a restaurant and not ask for a takeout box, picture this.
There is a road that leads from the border of Somalia to a huge refugee complex in Kenya. The dusty path is packed with Somalis fleeing their troubled country in search of safety and food.
Thousands of Somalis walk days and sometimes weeks along the road to the Dadaab refugee complex, hoping to find shelter and something to eat.
Somalia, a lawless, war-ravaged country without a viable government, has been hit by prolonged drought.
The crops dried up, the livestock died and what food they had stored ran out. So many Somalis, many of them who formerly fed their families by farming, have been forced to set out walking.
Many of them don’t make it. Many of those are children.
The relief agency Save the Children reports more than 300 children have been abandoned along the road to the Dadaab refugee complex. Some were left behind by desperate families no longer able to care for them, while others were orphaned when their parents perished during the arduous journey.
Children are being left to die in the dust as hundreds more people walk past, so wrapped up in their own pain and desperation they are unable to offer even the slightest aid.
Abdi Aden, a Somali man who left his failed farm because of the drought, told NBC News about losing his 8-year-old son. The family had walked for eight days when the boy collapsed.
“He tried to cry before he died, but he could not,” Aden told NBC. “He was so weak. He died peacefully from hunger.”
Whether or not you toss that half-eaten burger into the trash or whether you let three bananas sit on the kitchen counter until they are as black as pitch would have made no difference to Abdi Aden’s son.
No matter what parents try to tell their children, cleaning your plate won’t mean a thing to the hungry, desperate people of Somalia.
But the idea of wasting food in the face of the deadly famine gripping Somalia is patently obscene.
Pray for the hungry people in Africa, in America and around the world. If you are not hungry, if you are blessed with the knowledge you won’t miss a meal unless you choose to, don’t take your good fortune for granted.
Remember that road in Somalia, remember those 300 children left for dead. Remember that little boy who tried to cry before he died, but couldn’t.