Someone once said that money is like a lot of things in life—its abundance doesn’t bring happiness, but its absence breeds misery.
Food is certainly that way. Having more than you need doesn’t make you a better person, but not having enough can ruin your life. But this blog isn’t just about a social problem. It’s about the worst possible version of any social problem: when children fall victim.
Nearly 20% of American children do not have consistent access to enough food, or sufficiently nutritious food, termed “food insecurity.” While many social terms underplay the problem, this one is apropos—children need sufficient, balanced nutrition, but they also need “security.” They are utterly dependent, which is why their suffering is so insufferable. “Food insecurity” is literally that: lack of a basic need that throws a child’s life into a mental, emotional, and physical tumult of worry and hunger.
Our bodies drive us to care for our needs in order of imperativeness. That is why food insecurity is so damaging. Childhood nutrition is so essential that its lack can shift the entire course of a life. A recent study has found that it increases risk of adulthood obesity by a factor of 1.3, diabetes by 1.4, and cardiac mortality by 1.5.1
All three of those categories are “at the heart” of overall wellbeing. We know because we spend most of our time building devices to support cardiothoracic surgery, cerebrovascular surgery, hemodialysis, and transplantation. Associated conditions are impacted significantly by obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases.
Therefore, eliminating food insecurity is one of the easiest ways to improve overall health and wellbeing on a global scale. Are you surprised that it’s easy? Well it is. Or at least, it should be, because…
Food insecurity should be eliminated because it has no justifiable reason to exist in the first place. According to the World Food Program, we produce more than enough food to feed every person on earth, but up to 1.3 billion tons go to waste every year.2 The sources of this waste are many: shipping delays, bureaucratic incompetence, hoarding, wealthy countries importing more than they can use simply to create overabundance in grocery stores...
When the world allows such needless problems to affect our children so deeply, one wonders if the problem is truly physical starvation.
Because it sounds more like moral starvation.
Thanks for reading,
Transonic Systems, Inc
The Measure of Better Results
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