Food Rides

Food Rides

1. Identify an inequality-related social problem or phenomenon (e.g., hunger), as well as the specific aspect that you intend to address (e.g., food insecurity among the rural poor).

Food Waste and Hunger

There is an important relationship between food waste and hunger in the United States, and both issues need to be remedied. The main causes of hunger throughout the world, and specifically the U.S., is food waste. Arguably, the major causes of hunger in the world are market economies, which in turn, lead to food waste. Our solution, Food Rides, addresses these problems by using food that would otherwise go to waste and instead distributing it in urban American communities.

Hunger affects millions of people throughout the world, especially in the United States. The major group of people affected by this problem is the homeless, but another notable demographic includes the millions of people who make a decent living that are still food-insecure. These people could still greatly benefit from Food Rides and accumulate large monetary savings year by year. To give a glimpse of how many people live in food-insecure environments, statistics show that “50.1 million Americans live in food-insecure households…33.5 million adults and 16.7 children,” and since 2006, the number of people who needed emergency food assistance rose from 25 million to 37 million (Hamm 3-5). Even more recently, “in 2011, 5.7 percent of U.S. households (6.8 million households and one-third of all food-insecure households) had very low food security” (Nord v). These numbers are very high and do not even include the homeless, as these are actual households who are struggling. On top of these unfortunate statistics, “about 27% of the 365 billion pounds of edible food available for consumption in the U.S. are wasted every year…[which] translates into a yearly 315.8 pounds per capita of wasted food” (Hamm 6).

A major cause of food waste is due to distribution inefficiencies....