World hunger is a very big problem in the world today, and with over sixteen million kids in America living in a household that struggles to put food on the table it’s a big problem here too. That’s one out of five kids whose families struggle to put food on the table and that statistic is overwhelming. Nearly twenty two percent of kids ages 18 and under live in poverty and are struggling with hunger every day. Even though hunger is a big problem hunger leads to other problems including poor academics, poor health, it’s harder for the kids that are hungry to graduate high school and college, and they will be less likely to be able to feed their own family. With two solutions we can stop world hunger. First we give the 165 billion dollars of food that we waste and give it to the hungry. My second and final solution is we give the crops that stay stranded on farms to the hungry and our problem could go way down.

The U.S. spends 165 billion dollars in food per year on food that gets wasted. Forty percent of the food in the U.S., goes uneaten per year and if we didn’t throw that food away and gave it to the homeless or poverty stricken people and families our hunger problem would go very far down. Around seven percent of the food grown on farms around the U.S. is stranded on the fields each year because of too much food demands and food safety scares but if there’s too much food why not give the excess food to the people that need it and not just let the crops that could save lives die without even being picked in the fields.

There are two solutions to the overwhelming problem of world hunger in our country. The first solution would be to give the homeless all the food the wealthy, well-off, and middle-class citizens throw out on a daily basis. There are twenty two percent of of kids in America struggle with poverty which leads to struggles with hunger so if we gave them the forty percent of the food wasted in the U.S. we would have a lot of food for the kids. Just because they don’t have money or are homeless they shouldn’t have to scrape the barrel to find food and eat what’s left from someone else’s dinner. We should be helping these kids even if we are just giving them the food we don’t want to the homeless kids they would still be grateful. This solution would help but I don’t think it will solve our problem because there are too many hungry kids on the U.S. and this amount of food won’t be able to feed them all. My second and final solution is to give the seven percent of crops stranded on farms per year whether it be to too much food on a farm or food scares that don’t turn out to be true. We are growing too much food and we still have people suffering from hunger which makes no sense to me. I believe if we used both of these solutions our hunger problem in the U.S. would go way down.

I care about this problem because I live in the Chicagoland area and whenever I go to Chicago I see homeless kids and adults running around, looking in the garbage searching for food, trying to get money, and trying to find shelter and it hurts me. I remember one time that I was in Chicago and I saw a pile of sheets move and it was a family trying to stay warm. I want there to be no more homeless kids in Chicago and the U.S. but we need more people in order to end hunger in America. We need people to care about these kids because no one else does. These kids are the lowest of the low but they are still people and people living in our country so they should matter to us all because they are our people. I care about them but the question is do you? Would you sacrifice your time, money, and food to help these kids like I have in my short fourteen years of life whether it be at a homeless shelter or giving cans to a canned food drive at my school. We need people and food producers across the country so that not just Illinois hears us put the forty nine other states too. These kids are like our kids and they deserve to have the same life as any other kid in the U.S. so please help.