Today in the United States there is about 35.9 million people that are poor. They can’t afford to buy enough food for themselves or their families, while one fifth of our food goes to waste, annually. With all that food being thrown away I learned it could have fed 49 million more people! With this being said there should be no person without food in America.

Surveys say that there is 350 billion pounds of food for us to eat, yet 100 billion of that is wasted. There should be no reason for that much edible food being wasted; this food could be going to the families who need it. Timothy Jones led a study which estimated that an average family of four people just throws away 590 dollars per year in just meats, fruits, vegetables and wheat products. Imagine all the families who waste that money and think about how many other families could have been fed. Not only does this food go to waste it also is an economic problem too. Jones says household food waste alone adds up to about 43 billion dollars a year. On average families waste 14 percent of food they buy some of it not even opened.

Some people might think that a reason why should we have to pay the people that are uneducated or don’t work and have jobs? Should everyone else have to pay? Today there are so many people on welfare, and it does help with poverty but for some people that don’t have jobs or homes they go hungry everyday. There should be more help for people like this because with minimum wage jobs it is hard for people to “make ends meet.”
It is said that one of the main reasons in America for poverty is minimum wage jobs, so many families are working five of these jobs and not even getting by. Our country should step up and start with making sure every person has food to eat. Our economy is struggling right now but we should really try for the families who can’t afford food, when we are wasting so much. It doesn’t make sense when we waste 100 billion pounds of food each year and still have people hungry.

We need to take action as a county and start helping all these families especially the children. They are the future of America. We need to stop wasting so much food, so we can feed the rest of our nation, not waste so much money spent on the food that goes to waste, and stop wasting all the valuable resources we have growing the food.

No person in America should have to go hungry. People should be more considerate on how wasteful they are. We should all think about the people out there who have don’t have anything to eat. The people that do should be thankful. Everyone should be more conscience on how much they waste so we can save money and help the people who the food need get it.












Works Sited

1.
http://www.povertyinamerica.psu.edu/
2.
http://uspoverty.change.org/
3.
http://www.soundvision.com/Info/poor/statistics.asp