Unusual lunch brings home message

More than 2.5 bil­lion peo­ple live in poverty. Over 925 mil­lion peo­ple suf­fer from chronic hunger. A child dies from hunger or a pre­ventable dis­ease every four sec­onds, or 22,000 chil­dren a day.

Peo­ple hear sta­tis­tics like these so often that some­times they go in one ear and out the other.

Fri­day, though, a group of stu­dents orga­nized a spe­cial lunch that demon­strated sta­tis­tics like these in hopes of rais­ing aware­ness on issues of hunger and poverty.

Ober­lin High School stu­dent Rachel Mentzer, the Inter­act Club, and the Food Aware­ness Club held an Oxfam Amer­ica Hunger Ban­quet in the high school’s gym. The ban­quet gave stu­dents the oppor­tu­nity to see with their own eyes the wide dis­par­ity of the three income brack­ets that divide the world’s population.

“We can talk a lot about inequal­i­ties, we can talk about dif­fer­ent lev­els of access to proper nutri­tion, we can talk about the num­ber of peo­ple who come to food banks, but to have this in a room where they can look over and see the dis­par­ity between the 15 per­cent and the rest of the world is really some­thing,” said Ober­lin schools super­in­ten­dent John Schroth.

Accord­ing to Oxfam — an inter­na­tional relief and devel­op­ment orga­ni­za­tion that works to find last­ing solu­tions to poverty, hunger, and social injus­tice — only 15 per­cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion make more than $12,000 a year. Another 35 per­cent make between $11,999 and $987 a year. The other 50 per­cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion make less than $987 a year.

Stu­dents at OHS were able to vol­un­teer to take part in the ban­quet. As the 130 stu­dents who signed up for the event entered the gym, they drew a ticket that deter­mined which income bracket they would rep­re­sent. They three brack­ets were assigned to sit in dif­fer­ent sections.

When it was time to eat lunch, the stu­dents rep­re­sent­ing the high-income group were given a three-course meal that con­sisted of salad, chicken and pota­toes, and cake. The middle-income group was given beans, rice, and water, while the low-income was only given a hand­ful of rice and some water.

The idea behind the event was to give stu­dents a visu­al­iza­tion of how much finan­cial dis­par­ity there is in the world today.

Mentzer had the idea for the event after attend­ing a sim­i­lar one while in Iowa for the National World Food Prize Competition.

“I thought the hunger ban­quet in Iowa was put on really well, and I thought it would be inter­est­ing to bring it to our school and to see how peo­ple would become involved with it here,” she said.

Mentzer, and her mother, made the rice and beans for the mid­dle and low-income groups, while the Food Aware­ness Club and the Inter­act Club pre­pared the meal for the high-income group.

“It shows that we have a group of stu­dents here that are aware of global issues, that care, and feel they can make a dif­fer­ence in the world today,” said Schroth. “I’m not sur­prised, because this is the kind of stu­dents we have here at Oberlin.”

Posted by Scott Mahoney on Dec 22 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.