Questions

How many Cheerios have we drowned down the sink?

This is a question I ask myself more than I care to admit, and it’s not just Cheerios, either. An uninspiring amount of food gets thrown away at our house. It annoys me, and so I often ask the question, “Why are we wasting food?”

But who’s really to blame? The 4-year-old who didn’t finish his cereal — again — or the almost 40-year-old who poured too much in the bowl for the seventh time in eight days?

Food has been on my mind lately, which is typical for humans in general, I suppose, and perhaps for Americans in particular. We are surrounded by food. Biologically speaking, securing food is the most important thing we do each day. In fact, National Geographic spent a sizable portion of last year trying to answer the very crucial question, “With the world’s population still skyrocketing, how will we feed everyone, in a sustainable way, by 2050?”

The magazine devoted multiple articles over the course of 12 months toward analyzing the issue of food. I didn’t take notes, or anything, but some of the more interesting takeaways were rather surprising.

For one thing, Earth, as a whole, does not have a food shortage. The planet actually provides more calories per person than what is either consumed or even needed. Hunger, thus, is not currently a problem of production but one of movement. What happens, then, to all those uneaten calories? Unfortunately, much of it just rots. More depressing, particularly in developed countries like the United States, much of it is simply thrown away. (See opening paragraph for more details.)

Another point that I found interesting, coming from a publication that prides itself on its scientific clarity, is that there is not a great deal of evidence to prove that genetically modified food is inherently bad for you. In fact, the magazine suggests that GM crops, such as corn and rice hybrids, will play a crucial role in feeding all those additional mouths by mid-century.

Granted, natural eating certainly tastes better and does makes a person feel more human. However, enjoying that debate is a luxury that many people on the planet don’t have, mostly because they’re too busy trying to find enough food — modified or not — to feed their families.

As an American, though, I think the most interesting article tried to tackle perhaps two of the weirdest questions of them all: “How is it that United States, with its abundant resources, even has a hunger problem, and weirder still, why are so many Americans simultaneously undernourished and overweight?”

Unfortunately, space does not allow an in-depth analysis of these questions, which is good, because I wanted to devote the last few paragraphs to discussing something else, anyway.

As many of you know, Blessings in a Backpack feeds hungry students in our community. The organization puts food into backpacks that many students take home on Friday nights to help nourish them until Monday morning. For many of our local youth, the school cafeteria is one of the few places where they can find a consistent meal. Is it saving lives? Probably not, but the program is certainly making lives better.

Now, like perhaps some of you, when I first heard about this program, my initial response was “Seriously? These kids have ‘no’ food between Friday and Monday? You’re telling me that in a community surrounded by cornfields, in a state saturated by social programs, in a nation battling an obesity epidemic, we’re stuffing backpacks with food? Seriously? How in the world is that going to solve the problem?”

And about that time, a little voice inside my head simply said,

“It’s not. Putting food into backpacks will not solve the problem. There will always be hunger. But it’s not your job to solve all the world’s problems. It’s your job to help people. You have not been asked to stop hunger. You have been asked to feed hungry people.”

After that little divine epiphany, I shut up for a while. I shut up and stopped asking so many damned questions, because that is exactly what such questions are. They are damned, they are distractions keeping us from doing what we know is good.

Sometimes we waste so much time asking stupid questions we don’t get around to actually answering anything. People don’t need more questions. They need blessed. We don’t need to have it all figured out before we act. Sometimes we just need to act.

This is what I find so inspiring about the people involved with Blessings in a Backpack. This is what is inspiring about all the local, community-driven organizations making the world a little better, piece by piece, person by person.

They don’t waste time asking silly questions. They are too busy pouring cereal.