Rock4Life Concert Blog

After I finish my homework, I usually eat some food and watch TV. One of my favorite shows is The Biggest Loser. On The Biggest Loser, several overweight people try to lose many pounds, over a series of weeks. At the end of my day, I also try to work on projects for Rock4Life. How do these two topics connect? Well, this year the members of Rock4Life are trying to raise money to help relieve world hunger. The more effort I put into the concert, the more I realized how terrible it is that the extra food Biggest Loser contestants eat, could feed several people for months at a time. Right now, there are 6,721,786,307 people in the world. 1,131,886,738 people are overweight. 890,903,520 are undernourished. How is this possible? In one country, people spent $222,132,665 on obesity related diseases, but across an ocean people are DYING of hunger! Some people are worried of getting too fat, and some even starve themselves. Across an ocean people are DYING because they cannot afford to buy food! I asked myself, “How can this be?” It is not like we cannot afford to feed the hungry. $31,386,242 could feed the hungry today. Yet, today America spent $96,580,082 on weight-loss programs. Today, people spent $41,048,819 on pet food. People in America spent more money on pets than on people DYING of hunger. How can this be? I figure maybe people do not know about the suffering of world hunger. I see at least 5 commercials about food every day, but I cannot remember seeing a commercial for helping the hungry in the past year. I know that people are trying though. $4,827,481 was spent on global food aid today. At the same time, $103,821,304 was spent on food purchased and then tossed this day. Before Rock4Life, I had no idea how big this problem was. I also had no idea how simple it would be to solve it. Yet, people are still hungry. People are still dying. 25,127 people have died of hunger today. 566,855 people have died of hunger this year. We can help them, but still we have not. I wonder, “Is it because we do not know?” or, “Is it because we do not care?”

-Maya E.