I’m Starving

How often have you said these words “I’m starving” most of us say this to mean we haven’t eaten either for a few hours or all day, we don’t actually mean we haven’t eaten anything for days.

Again it’s something else we don’t talk about poverty and hunger, mental illness, living with chronic pain, homelessness, we all know they exist but depending on your viewpoint it comes down to how well you wish to be informed about these issues which are very prevalent within our society.

I’ve been hungry, not something I’d ever experienced, but when I was first homeless and had no money, it could be 3-4 days before I’d eat anything let alone something substantial, you see I’d taken food for granted.

You see I’d never been poor either, oh I’ve been broke and struggled to make ends meet sometimes, but I’m talking about no money, hard to imagine isn’t it, so what with homelessness and poverty mixed together, it makes you realise something, it’s not just something you see on the news, you remember as kids you were told all about the starving kids in Africa, you had to think yourself very fortunate to be having anything at all.

Picture if you will being homeless I’m not just talking about myself, your wandering around and you watch people eating through the windows of restaurants, you watch as people throw away half eaten sandwiches,burgers, push half eaten meals away, when you go to a friends for dinner and it’s all you can do to stop yourself gobbling down the food in front of you.

When a friend orders food, you can’t because you have no money, your embarrassed to asked if they would buy you something to eat and you watch as they devour every mouthful, your stomach clawing at your spine, as you watch every swallow almost tasting the food, it just doesn’t occur to some to offer you anything, why because they’ve never been hungry, not that they should feel guilty about that, it just never happened.

I’m a feeder when you come to my home, the first thing offered is food and a drink, and often send people home with packages, because I don’t believe in waste and sometimes if I know someone doesn’t have much, at least they’ll have something to eat.

I always get especially cross when I think of children and with new benefit cuts many more families in the UK will be living below the poverty line, how can this be in 2015 the 6th richest country in the world has people living in abject poverty, it hardly seems possible but it is.

With further cuts coming, not only will the poor become poorer those who are on disability will have huge cuts, which means there has to be a choice between water, gas, electricity, food, which is the most important which one can you do without.

Even if you have both adults working they are still having to depend on food banks,because they don’t have enough money, it’s not that I blame the government (I’m pissed off that no bankers went to prison for gambling away our futures) and I don’t agree that benefits should be a lifestyle, however people depend on their benefits as a way to survive and that’s all you’re doing, and I fear even greater homelessness and poverty for the future.

Supermarkets throw away some 30,000 tonnes of food in the first half of last year and yet people are starving, it makes no sense and is completely unacceptable, obscene, yet all the major supermarkets are reporting similar figures.

Arash Derambarsh    has campaigned for French supermarkets to give unsold foods to charity, Tescos a few weeks ago also agreed to do the same thing, hopefully our other big brands will follow suit.

My analogy to all this is the Facebook game Farmville, I used to play this, but got to thinking with all this farming we were doing even though virtual, we planted we harvested, we made produced, and shared it amongst our many farm friends, as I got through the various levels and actually had quite a large farm it occurred to me if this was real we could probably feed the world.

Have you ever been hungry