“It wasn’t my turn.” ~ a US child when asked if he had eaten breakfast that morning (Grace at the Table). Why in a world of plenty, are so many hungry? The answers are complicated and disputed, but include: poverty (1.2 billion people in developing countries live on an income of $1/day or less), powerlessness (women are often the primary producers of food, yet 70% of those who suffer from hunger worldwide are women & girls), national debt (some countries spend more on debt repayment than on education, health care, and nutrition combined), violence & militarism (there are currently 15 million refugees worldwide), economic globalization (large multi-national food companies have stimulated opportunity for the few, but caused poverty, unemployment, and food insecurity for many others, while providing nutritionally deficient food-like products instead of healthy local food), AIDS (which has killed 7 million agricultural workers since 1985 in the worst-affected African countries), and environmental degradation due to industrialized agriculture (which instead of traditional crop rotation and diversity, grows one crop over and over, depleting the soil and requiring more fertilizer and more and more pesticides; industrial animal feedlots destroy land and contaminate water for thousands of communities.) But what can I do, you ask? Overwhelming problems like hunger must be addressed one small step at a time. Such actions, committed in faith, can have far-reaching effects [James 2:14-17]. THIS WEEK: VOTE WITH YOUR FORK. Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. They are outnumbered by another historical first: the one billion people on this planet who are overweight. Global hunger & obesity are symptoms of the same problem—our industrialized food system. A perversity of the way our food comes to us is that it’s now possible for people who can’t afford enough to eat to be obese. When the number of companies controlling the gateways from farmers to consumers is small, it gives them market power over the people who produce the food AND the people who eat it. Groups around the world have been trying to broaden the food system to give back the choices that have been taken away from the people who grow and the people who eat. The food system has left many stuffed and many starved, with people at both ends of the food system obese and impoverished, and with a handful of the system’s architects extremely wealthy” ~ Raj Patel, “Stuffed and Starved.” BUYING LOCALLY SOURCED REAL FOOD FROM SMALL FARMS, GROWING SOME OF YOUR OWN FOOD, AND LIVING MORE SUSTAINABLY ARE WAYS WE CAN ALL VOTE AGAINST THE INDUSTRIALIZED FOOD SYSTEM EVERY DAY.