When I worked at the Rescue Mission we sometimes served 3000 meals a day . That is not three thousand men and woman eating with us because folks often ate more that one of our meals. Somehow all that food being served provoked visitors to ask “If God is so loving why are there so many people hungry in the world?”
When asked I answered “Have you thanked him for your lunch?” It seemed to me if God was to be blamed for hungry people He/She should be thanked for all the people who had food everyday.
I Human population has been exploding for a long time now. In this country when I was in High School the Us Had about 150 million people. Now our population is about double that.
The miracle is that as population has grown so has our ability to produce food because scientific developments have kept pace with population growth. There is now plenty of food available to comfortably feed everyone.
The problem is not a lack of food, In the US there is a very serious of problem of food wastage. When I was at the Mission a Roman Catholic service group began to pick up the food in the dumpster of one large downtown grocery store. They were very careful to avoid rotten food and carefully cleaned the food they used. Out of the rescued food they made a very delicious lovingly prepared soup or stew.
Many street people had wonderful meals thanks to them. Ultimately the city made the the laymen stop their program because there was cleaning and other chemicals mixed in with the good food.
These days it is a common practice for cities to separate recyclable items from the other trash. In a similar way the store could have found another way to dispose of chemicals. In fact mixing the chemicals with common trash was very bad for the environment because all those chemicals soaked into our water supply. A city could have taken unrelated actions to save food and to protect the environment.
In places in Africa food donated to help the poor gets stolen by warlords. That food then becomes the means of exchange that finances their terrorist activities. The powerful over consume food so that people like me can be overweight. There is no doubt that the food distribution problem could be improved.
If the food distribution system improved by 20% many more people could have food. Working on that problem seems to be included in the Matthew suggestion that if we seek first the Kingdom of God then all the rest we need will be added unto us.
George Caywood 