Blinded by abundance

Blinded by abundance—an abundance that, ahem, you can see on our waistlines and hips—we find real, honest-to-goodness famine hard to imagine. If we’re eating, and we’re supporting the food pantry, and we give regularly to ELCA World Hunger, everybody else must be eating too, right? Unfortunately, no.

I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’m a “famine forgetter.”

I can learn more about the relationship between our over-full bellies and hunger around the world—especially about the 40 percent of the U.S. food supply that ends up in landfills. In what way is wasting nearly half of our food caring for our neighbor or our planet? How can Lutherans like me see a food justice issue happening in our own backyard?

This message is an excerpt of “Famine forgetters” by Anne Basye in the April 2018 issue of Gather magazine.