I woke up to the sound of a large green truck, dumping its contents into the cumulating heaps of broken objects and spoiled food. The dump truck leaves to continue its consecutive trips. I crawl out of my hut, carefully put together from scraps of metal and cardboard. I scan the piles of newly dumped rubbish, hoping to find something comestible to eat. I dig through the piles, only to find a moldy chunk of cheese and several McDonald’s cups. I grab the hardly recognizable piece of cheese and gently scrape off the increasing mold covering its surface with a dilapidated plastic fork, trying as hard as I am able not to be rid of any of the precious morsel. I eat it slowly, so as not to waste a single bit.

I continue to excavate through the large pile of trash, fining nothing but empty soda cans, smashed beer bottles, broken furniture, and even more fast food cups and utensils. The numerous chunks of food I find are either so badly smashed, or too moldy, or too small, or possibly even too mixed up with some harmful chemical to even begin to be described as edible.

Every day, twenty-five thousand people die of hunger, that’s about one person every three seconds. That same number of people die from obesity each month in the United States alone. It would cost one hundred and fifty billion dollars each year to cure basically every aspect of world poverty. Americans spend one hundred and thirty-five billion each year at fast food restaurants. That isn’t even counting all that extra junk food we obtain at the grocery store!

Personally, I think this world would be a much better place if US citizens took into account the lives of people in third world countries who die from lack of food which we, as Americans, tend to majorly overdose on. I challenge everyone who reads this article; next time you want to take that extra couple of bucks you earned from mowing your neighbors lawn and go buy a Mcflurry from Micky Ds, stop and think, do you really need those extra calories? Or would you rather save someone’s life?