Working at a restaurant, four days in a row, for 10 hour double shifts is slightly worse than normal when you are living off $2 a day for food expenses. I don't think I really need to describe how awful it has been.
As sizzling fajita towers rush past me and the smell of chicken and capsicum lingers, every day I become hungrier and miss the taste of so many foods - and it has only been four days. Although I have been hungry, it has also been about experiencing the lack of choice that those living in poverty have to face. The lack of choice of what I get to eat. The fact that if I accidentally forget to take my food to work, I cannot just buy myself a new lunch. And yet at the same time, I am so lucky because I still have that ultimate ability to choose.
As I sat on a booth after working a double shift tonight, my stomach eating itself and me eating everyones ears off with how hungry I am, my manager said I should just cheat. Just to eat something and that she won't tell anyone.
Isn't it amazing (in an awful way) that we can "cheat" our way out of poverty. That I can negotiate my meals to fit in 33c of chocolate. That I can consider rewarding myself every 5 days with some nice tasty food. That if I fall sick, or get malnutrition, or am just too hungry or weak, that I can stop this.
Imagine if we couldn't choose. And imagine if it was not just for food. Imagine one of your kids fell sick, and you have to choose between life saving medication and a weeks worth of food. How are you supposed to make a heart wrenching choice like that? A world where this kind of unfairness is seen should NOT exist. It is not right.
And this leads on to my next point....
wastage.
$5.2 billion of food is wasted every year in Australia alone and still, 1.4 billion people are living on less than $2 a day.
When two thirds of the worlds population have four fifths of the worlds food and four fifths of this food is wasted, meaning sixteen twenty-fifths of the worlds food is wasted, which is over half of all the food in the world that is just thrown away, and 1.4 billion people cannot even afford more than one meal a day, the unfairness of this is just outrageous.
The fact that this is allowed to happen is pathetic and outrageous and stupid and ridiculous. This sort of world should NOT exist.
At my work, I am a host and do a lot of clearing of tables, and almost every single table has wasted food. Some tables have entire meals that have been barely touched and some have had a few bites. And scraping the remains of peoples lunches into the bin makes me so sad, as I know that millions and millions of people would absolutely die to eat out of that one rubbish bin at TGI Fridays.
I just believe that this is so unfair and I wonder how people can live with themselves after leaving a barely touched meal wasted, while children in Bangladesh are eating other peoples apple cores that they have found on the street, just to survive another day. This is actually real, my dad has seen it.
Poverty is not normal and acceptable and natural. It is man made. It needs to be eradicated. It is an unfair condition and ridiculous, as it is not like we don't have the resources to educate and feed every single person in the world. The curing of poverty would improve the entire worlds well being.
I know it can be eradicated. I am working towards eradicating it within my lifetime.
Are you with me?
No comments:
Post a Comment