World hunger is something that’s not easy to fathom.

It’s especially not easy to understand when it doesn’t affect you directly.

In order to help the community better understand this issue, Dominican University partnered with Concordia University Chicago to host an Interfaith Hunger Banquet Thursday evening. The banquet, modeled after a similar exercise by Oxfam International, has become an annual event for the universities.

To illustrate the different income brackets, participants are randomly put into three groups. The high-income group sits at a cloth-covered table and receives a full dinner of chicken, vegetables and potatoes, while the middle-income group gets the rice and beans at smaller tables. The low-income majority sits on the floor and passes around a bowl of rice.

My Experience

Would you ever think you’d feel guilty eating a bowl of rice and beans for a meal? I didn’t.

After all, it’s not much – at least not as much as most Americans are used to eating every day.

Yet a single bowl of rice and beans, with water to drink, are all an estimated 35 percent of the people in the world get to eat each day. That’s the nutrition for the middle-income bracket, where most of America’s poverty-stricken fall.

Here’s where the guilt comes in: 50 percent of the rest of the world only get a serving of rice each day, and maybe some water if they’re lucky. These people make below $900 a year, which figures out to less than $2.50 a day.

It becomes abundantly clear how well off many of us are when faced with eating a better meal literally elevated above the poorer majority.

Rounding it out, the last 15 percent are those who can afford to exceed their daily calorie needs most of the time, often leading to heart disease and diabetes. This group consumes 70 percent of the world’s grain, including grain-fed meat.

It’s no surprise this is the only group where you’d be sure to get adequate health care and education, and where most Americans reside.

To drive home the state of inequity around the world, a “drought” at the event meant not everyone got water. Some people moved from middle-income to low-income, or vice versa, during the dinner depending on life circumstances such as poor working conditions, being laid off or new business coming to town.

Fostering discussion

After the meal, participants broke off into small groups for discussion. In my group, there were three DU students, a mother with two young children and Oak Parker Nancy Fox.

Fox said the banquet, her first, was eye-opening.

“It’s a really graphic way to present the issue,” she said. “It brought it home to see the physical-ness of it.”

Fox is a social work coordinator at Chicago Semester, an off-campus program that helps students come to Chicago for internships, seminars and urban living. She’s now planning a hunger banquet for that group.

In my group discussion, the five participants are Christian, Catholic and Baptist, with varying degrees of practice in their faiths.

Yet all concluded that any of us could be one of the starving —we cannot help where we’re born, after all.

Help locally and globally

Kathy Russell, executive director of the Oak Park River Forest Food Pantry, said even though most in the community might have a hard time realizing it, more than 7,000 residents in Oak Park and 900 residents in River Forest deal with daily food insecurity.

Across the globe, 12,458 people will die of hunger today, according to United Nations statistics.

It’s statistics like those that prompt people into action.

Matt Palkert, part of Dominican’s University Ministry team, said after last year’s banquet he heard from many people who wanted to help curb the hunger problem.

While Russell spoke, little kids walked around the room handing out decks of “call to action” cards and single dollar bills.

Around the perimeter of the room, groups including Feed My Starving Children, PADs, Water Crisis, the Oak Park Food River Forest Pantry and KIVA had jars for those dollars and information for any person who wanted to learn more ways they could help. (FYI: You were welcome to keep the dollar, if you wanted. This reporter did not.)

Palkert said the hunger banquet is only the start of new and renewed efforts to end hunger.

“It’s my hope that people felt something tonight,” he said. “I think that’s one of the wonderful things that interfaith cooperations bring to social change – when people are in touch with their belief, their inspiration, their faith, action is more sustained, more meaningful.”

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