Hunger, what does it mean? After a long day at school, you can't wait to get home and raid the refrigerator. Maybe you stop on the way to buy a candy bar or a hotdog. If dinner is late getting on the table, you feel grouchy and snappish and bark at your sister or brother. Watching TV after you homework is out of the way, you start munching snacks washed down with cold milk.

That's being hungry the way most people know it.

It's very different from the hunger that is an everyday fact of life for millions of people around the world. They're hungry, hungry all the time, hungry because they are too poor to buy the food the body needs. For people who've never been underfed, it's very hard to imagine what it's like to wake up hungry, to be hungry all day, and to go to sleep at night still feeling hungry. It's a slow death, not visible to the untrained eye. But the lack of food takes its toll on life all the same.

Hunger has afflicted people throughout history. The first record of famine was in Egypt in the year 3500 BC. War, drought, floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes

When it comes to hunger and poverty we often forget about the elderly. In 1982 America alone had four million elderly living at or near the poverty level, which was set at $5,000 per person per year. That was not nearly enough to buy life's necessities. Huger of the elderly in Detroit has led to the old people going in restaurants and ordering a cup of tea at uncleared tables and eating leftovers. Also the elderly was known for opening and eating from packages of cookies or cold cuts on the supermarket shelf while pretending to shop. Hunger in Detroit is anger. The old people saying, " They treat us like an old horse, only they don't shoot us, they just starve us inch by inch. They've got the food , but they just won't give it to us".The anger of the old people is quiet despair, knowledge that the refusal of food is a final rejection, that one's fate is a lingering, lonely, fearful, and disregarded wait for death.

The poor deserve a developmental chance, the first step is to relieve them of their hunger.

Malnourished children are much more likely to die as a result of a common childhood disease than those who are adequately nourished. .Research indicates a link between malnutrition in early life, including the period of foetal growth and the development later in life of chronic conditions like coronary heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure, giving countries in which malnutrition is already a major problem new cause for concern.

Hunger continues to plague an estimated one billion people, one in every five persons around the globe. Yet the world produces more than enough food to feed everyone. In America almost 100 billion pounds of safe, edible food like meat and poultry, fruit and vegetables, milk and eggs are thrown away every year by retailers, restaurants, and farmers while twenty-five million Americans are hungry, including 12 million children. In the United States, more than one out of every four children are hungry or at the risk of being hungry.

Seventy percent of the world's poor are female. It is becoming more and more common for families to be headed by women. For many women poverty begins when their marriage ends. Half of all marriages in the United States end in divorce. One in six families is headed by women who have to support children. Payments for child support amount to very little. About 40 percent of divorced fathers do not contribute to their children upkeep, and those who do were paying an average of $2,100 a year in 1984. That is hardly even $6 a day which buys little food. So the woman who must both raise and support her children must earn a family wage.

The number of people who die from hunger every 3 1/2 days is the same number of people who died from the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War Two.

Some common words found in the essay are:
Hunger Detroit, African Asian, Phoenix Arizona, BC War, East Asia, Watching TV, War Malnutrition, , United Nations, House Capitol, hunger hunger, food banks, hungry hungry, world hunger, malnourished children, world relief canada, united nations, children die, hungry people, percent world's, families headed women, non-governmental organizations,
Approximate Word count = 2052
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)