After returning from a life changing year in Chicago doing the program Mission Year, I went to Eastern where I continued to have my thinking challenged. I met others of like mind and we often used classes to moan about the state of this country and how “twisted” or “screwed up” it has become. Our professors were nice enough to listen to our constant moaning and challenge us to not just moan, but do something about the screwed up world we saw. Examples of graduates from our school were all around us, from the well known Tony Campolo (international speaker) to the lesser known Bryan Stevenson (lawyer who represents low-income death-row inmates)
Don’t just talk, do.
During my time at school I worked at the local mall and was amazed at the abundance of wealthy spending amidst workers that were anything but. This mall has dozens of restaurants in it as well as another dozen surrounding it. One night my roommate who also worked in the mall was leaving and saw an Auntie Anne’s employee finishing up. He observed this worker dumping one small bag and one HUGE bag into the trash can. Curious he decided to dig through it. He found a giant bag of untouched pretzels as well as all the other hot stuff Auntie Anne’s sells. Being a poor college kid he looked around to see if anyone was looking, grabbed the bag and brought it back to school. We then had a pretzel party and invited all our friends over. Once they heard they were free Auntie Anne’s pretzels they started pouring into our apartment. I started thinking, this one small pretzel shop just threw out over 100 pretzels. Of all the other 30 restaurants in or around the mall how much did they throw out? How much food waste went on at this single mall? All while knowing this was just one mall of millions that dot our country.
It started to bug me when I saw how much I was throwing out. I watched the trays loaded up in the line at school and watched the trays be unloaded into the trash. As I became more aware of this issue I decided I needed to learn more.
For two classes I wrote two different papers about food. One dealing with the over-arching problem of hunger in America, the other on Obesity and how it relates to Low-Socioeconomic status.
Thus I became interested in Food Waste and Hunger in America.
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