Taking the Time to Make a Difference

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I never got to see it, but I heard a lot about it, when I was a small boy, in our home town. It was a combine. A farm machine so big it took three railroad flat cars to bring the pieces of it into town. My mother and father had a small farm, land enough to raise a lot of tomatoes and potatoes and other crops for the table – and also to grow a few acres of wheat, some corn and maybe some oats. This new machine was big enough to use on thousands and thousands of acres. It was a combine – a name that grew out of the technological developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It combined the functions of reaping and threshing. The marvelous new machine was self-propelled. It had its own engine. It was self-contained. The operator could sit in an enclosed cabin and listen to the radio while cutting a swath 18 feet wide along the miles of wheat growing in the bottom land alongside the Mississippi River. One machine could travel through a field of ripe wheat, mow it off at a uniform level, shake it and shuffle it so that the grains of wheat could be conveyed into a bin, and the straw and the chaff could be blown out in an endless row behind the machine. Today, such equipment receives signals from satellites, and the marvels of technology continue to compound. So why, I can’t help but wonder, why are people in the world still hungry?

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The clear answer to this question is that technology is not enough, not for planting or harvesting or even transporting foodstuffs from field to market. A recent message from Pope Benedict XVI, delivered in Rome to a conference on world food security, insisted that “hunger and malnutrition are unacceptable in a world which has, in fact, levels of production, resources and knowledge sufficient to put an end to such dramas and their consequences.” The pope went on to say that “purely technical and economic considerations must not prevail over the duties of justice towards people suffering from hunger.” He said “Each person has the right to life. Hence it is necessary to promote the effective implementation of this right, and peoples suffering from lack of food must be helped to become gradually capable of satisfying their own need for healthy and sufficient nourishment.” None of us is self-propelled, self-contained. We need to feed each other.

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The gospel call to feed the hungry is not one option among many acts of charity – it is a matter of justice. And our trust must not be in technology, but in the Lord. When Jesus walked the earth, his disciples were criticized for helping themselves to grain from the fields on the Sabbath. If I understand what Jesus said to his critics, as described in the sixth chapter of Luke’s Gospel, it was that even the holiness of the Sabbath was less important than getting food to the hungry.

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A recent issue of U.S. News and World Report (May 19, 2008), with a cover story on “How to Solve the Global Food Crisis,” provides a list of ways “one person can help feed many mouths.” Here are three ideas.

• Donate money. The magazine lists some agencies including Oxfam America, the U.N. Food Program and CARE. Add Catholic Relief Services to the list for direct assistance, and Bread for the World to help bring about a change in national policy.
• Support food banks. They rescue food that would otherwise go to waste. The magazine reports that 25,000 people die each day from hunger, while the United States throws away 96 billion pounds of food each year.
• Reduce food waste at home and give the money you save to an organization that will help you to make a difference.

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