What we have for our lunches may have an effect on the people in our community, and I’m not talking about how good the lunches are. I’m referring to the ability to get lunch. Something we take for granted every day.  In today’s time, there could be as many as 200 million people in the world that could be homeless. That number is a bit less than the population of the United States and would make the world’s homeless population into the sixth largest country in the world by population. There are about 780 million people in the world suffer from poor health and malnourishment. For the US, that’s about 1/8 of our population suffering.

Why is this important? It’s important because there is a chance that there could be someone in your life that could be in a position where they are suffering from the choices that we make every day.

When you wake up, what is the first thing that you do? Well, most people go and get breakfast.  As you are eating you look at the time, and darn you’re out of time,  so you throw your food in the sink. Done. You can’t eat that, but you did just waste half a bowl of cereal. That’s what we do for most of our meals, we throw it away not thinking how many lives we could change or even save. We’ve all heard that admonishment: “Don’t waste that food, there is a kid starving in Africa.” In this case, it’s true according to TIME magazine it states that about 14 million people are starving and another 7 million people are at risk. Out of those people, 350,000 are kids whose age is less than 5 years. Take a moment and think about it, it’s not hard for someone to do something, for there are 7.5 billion people in the world that can change something about this. According to borenproject.org if every person was to donate anywhere between $1-5, it could be a change in the battle against hunger.

This isn’t just something that the individual is responsible for. As a Safeway deli employee, I fell the need to say that we cook good food every day and everything, but my biggest problem is that when it comes to the night time, we end up throwing so much good food that it makes my stomach turn. Close to 50 pounds of food gets thrown away, I have asked people why we can’t donate the food to a shelter. The answer is the same: we can’t because it’s not healthy for us to give the food away. I find that is a boring answer to give, I know health-wise the food might not be the best, but it is food and people need it. On Tuesday, December 12,  I helped a lady that couldn’t get food because of food stamps, when she asked what we do with all the food at the end of the day, I had to say we throw it away, it was heart braking, I had to change the way we surplus food so that she could have a warm meal at the end of the day. That’s what I want to do, too many people come by and it hurts doing nothing.

How can we help people? Well, we can start off by volunteering our time. Time is a precious thing, something we can’t get back. But, then we waste so much time making food just to throw the food away, shouldn’t we use it to help people instead of ignoring people in need? There are plenty of organizations looking for help these holidays.

The second one thing that can be of service is a donation. Donations to non-profit organizations like Feeding America or Action For Healthy Kids are great choices. All of these programs are set to help people that are in need.

The last option is to make a food drive. Most schools have these programs already set up already but if they don’t this would be a great opportunity for them to have them. We are in the year where food and donations, in general, make the biggest impact for people that don’t have much, also just remember if you where in that spot wouldn’t you want someone to help you?