One of the privileges of being American is that relative to the rest of the world, we don’t suffer with hunger. Yet, 1 billion people go hungry every day. Yeah, that’s a big number. And 6 million children die from hunger each year. Every five seconds a child dies from hunger-related causes. This translates to 25,000 young lives lost every day day from hunger.

We throw away 40 percent of our food in America while 54 nations do not produce enough food to feed their people. We produce enough food for everyone, yet 1 billion people remain hungry.

We are fortunate to have so much land to produce food.  Yet, in Iowa we have all this beautiful and rich soil, but we are losing 100 farms a month. And in the past 60 years, Iowa has lost over 100,000 farms.

Some ways we can help end world hunger are waste less food, buy local food, and buy fair trade. You can even talk to restaurants about offering local food, too. And we should do everything possible to save Iowa’s fertile farmland.  There are so many ways we can end world hunger. You can do one of these things and see that it has a big impact on hunger. 

— Tasha Schepanski, North Central Junior High School seventh-grader