B
efore I eat dinner each night I say a Buddhist meal prayer, the beginning goes like this:
‘Enumerable labors brought us this food, we should be mindful of how it comes to us and consider whether
our practice and virtue deserve it…’
Those first lines always bring me to pause and to appreciate how truly lucky I am to have the food I am
about to eat. So many in the developing world and so many, too many, in our very own country go to bed
hungry, wake up hungry and hope to find enough sustenance to make it to another day. Combined this
with the staggering amounts of food wasted in the U.S. and how much of it could be used to feed those
without and you have a tragic dilemma, bogged down in regulations and red tape. And don’t be fooled
by looks alone, the homeless are not the only ones in food crisis. It could easily be the elderly man or
woman you see on the bus each morning, or a young man who from all appearances seems like any
other youth, save for the secret he keeps close. So as we focus on food in this issue of The Cone I don’t
want to forget the many who are often left with little, if anything at all. Here are some of the numbers:
48.1
14%
million Americans lived in food insecure households, including
32.8 million adults and 15.3 million children. *
of households (17.4 million households) were food insecure. *
More
than one in three African American children (34%) live in foodinsecure households & as compared to one in seven (15%)
Caucasian children.*
More
More than one in four Latino children (29%) live in foodinsecure households as compared to one in seven (15%) White,
non-Hispanic children.*
* all statistics are from www.feedingamerica.org
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THE CONE - ISSUE #7 - FALL 2015