For the month of September (and some of October) our entire church is doing a series called "Hope Lives", a look at global poverty and how we as a church can still have hope and be the change necessary in this fight.
Yesterday I was reading (as I sometimes do) and came across a horrible statistic that got me thinking in light of our series. In America, we throw away 96 billion pounds of eatable food a year. Just think about that for a second. Not rotten food, just extra food (more specifically, categorized as "edible surplus food"). 96 billion pounds (or an average of 300 pounds a person). 96 billion pounds.
I don't think anyone would argue that we are not only comfortable in America, we have too much. But really? We have so much food we throw it away, the leftovers we don't feel like eating in the fridge, the food at a restaurant we don't want on our plate along with the extra they bought and cooked hoping for customers (in our quick microwave society, we don't want to wait for it to be cooked to order), food in grocery stores that just sit to expiration...
Can you fathom that? 96 billion pounds. Hey, I wonder what most people in the world would think just to walk through a grocery store here, but what if they knew how much we threw away?
Let's do our part to feed the world, not the garbage pile.
T
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