Words are powerful. That’s why I don’t allow my kids to say things like, “I’m starving”. They don’t know what starving feels like. Fortunately, I don’t know that feeling either. Really, I don’t even like for them to say, “I’m hungry”, because they have never been deprived of food a day in their lives. One of my great hopes as a parent is that they never will experience true hunger/go without food. Unfortunately, I know that there are children all over the world who go to bed (and wake up!) truly hungry every day.
ShopRite Partners In Caring, a regional hunger-fighting initiative, is partnering with General Mills to raise awareness about the issue of hunger. For the past 10 years, the ShopRite Partners In Caring program has donated $2 million annually to local food banks equaling $20 million to date. Recently, they created a “Blog It Forward to Fight Hunger” program to help inform as many people as possible about the fight against hunger. I’ll help by sharing a few statistics (national and regional) from their site:
-As of 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than 35 million Americans lived in households considered “food insecure” including 12.4 million children. That’s about one in every eight households in the nation. Food insecurity is defined as having “limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways.” Think about that – with those types of numbers, practically all of us know at least one family that falls in this category
-As of 2004, 14.4% of the (18.6 million) New York population lived in poverty. Those numbers included approximately 970,000 children live in poverty and 353,000 elderly live in poverty. To me, hunger is bad when it affects anyone. For some reason though, it makes me especially sad when the very young and the very old – typically the most helpless demographics – go hungry.
To help in the fight against hunger, General Mills and ShopRite will donate one box of cereal to a food bank in ShopRite’s trading area for the first 30 people who leave a comment on this post by August 13th. My regular readers know that I have a soft spot for charitable initiatives, so please leave a comment regarding any aspect of hunger below. Please! (Don’t make me beg. At what other time will you be able to donate a box of cereal for a good cause without spending a cent?!) Thanks in advance for helping me – in a very small way- fight hunger.
FYI: I (along with up to 99 other participating bloggers) will be featured in a photo mosaic on the back of a limited edition Honey Nut Cheerios Box as a result of participating in this hunger-fighting program.
