Today is World Food Day

To be healthy and active, we must have food in adequate quantity, quality and variety to meet our energy and nutrient requirements. Without adequate nutrition, children cannot develop their potential to the fullest, and adults will experience difficulty in maintaining or expanding theirs.
Not everyone has adequate access to the food they need, and this has led to large-scale hunger and malnutrition in the world. More than 850 million people today are chronically undernourished and unable to obtain sufficient food to meet even minimum energy needs. Approximately 200 million children under five years of age suffer from acute or chronic symptoms of malnutrition; during seasonal food shortages, and in times of famine and social unrest, this number increases. According to some estimates, malnutrition is an important factor among the nearly 13 million children under five who die every year from preventable diseases and infections, such as measles, diarrhoea, malaria and pneumonia, or from some combination of these.


Even mild forms of these deficiencies can limit a child’s development and learning capacity early in life, which can lead to cumulative deficits in school performance, resulting in higher school drop-out rates and a high burden of illiteracy in our future populations. Many of the most severe health consequences of these three leading micronutrient deficiencies could be greatly alleviated by ensuring adequate food supplies and varied diets that provide essential vitamins and minerals.

Putting an end to hunger necessarily starts with ensuring that enough food is produced and available for everyone. However, simply growing enough food does not guarantee the elimination of hunger. Access by all people at all times to enough nutritionally adequate and safe food for an active and healthy life – food security – must be guaranteed. Worldwide, increased efforts to ensure food security are needed in order to eliminate hunger and malnutrition, and their devastating consequences, among current generations and those to come. The contribution of each and every one of us – through information sharing, caring and participating in activities – is imperative to ensuring the fundamental right of all human beings to be free from hunger.

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We at St. Joseph's are proud of our Catholic heritage to reach and serve the poor and the hungry. As a parish we offer two cooked meals a week and foods from our pantry. MAny people in our parish are engaged in this process of offering nutrition to our local hungry.

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Words form our Holy Father, Benedict XVI in celebration of this World Day of Food:
"The theme of this year's World Food Day, 'United against Hunger'", is a timely reminder that everyone needs to make a commitment to give the agricultural sector its proper importance. Everyone - from individuals to the organisations of civil society, States and international institutions - needs to give priority to one of the most urgent goals for the human family: freedom from hunger. In order to achieve freedom from hunger it is necessary to ensure not only that enough food is available, but also that everyone has daily access to it: this means promoting whatever resources and infrastructures are necessary in order to sustain production and distribution on a scale sufficient to guarantee fully the right to food.

"If the international community is to be truly 'united' against hunger, then poverty must be overcome through authentic human development, based on the idea of the person as a unity of body, soul and spirit. Today, though, there is a tendency to limit the vision of development to one that satisfies the material needs of the person, especially through access to technology; yet authentic development is not simply a function of what a person 'has', it must also embrace higher values of fraternity, solidarity and the common good".


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