Final Speech -William Webb

FOOD IS A BASIC HUMAN RIGHT

It happens to all of us.  

We wake up late, don’t have time to eat and by 2^nd hour our stomach is making funny noises and the beginning of a headache is forming.  

Or we don’t really like our choices at lunch so we skip it and by the time we are home from school, maybe even after a club meeting or practice, we are “hangry.”  That grumpy and irritated mood, a combination of anger and hunger, many of us fall into when we haven’t eaten but really need to.

Now anyone who knows me at all knows that I am SERIOUS about my food.  I think about food, when I am going to eat- what I am going to eat- and probably because it’s me- how much I am going to eat, ALL THE TIME.

So it may come as no surprise that when thinking about a serious topic to give a speech about my mind automatically went to food- in particular a lack of food. So I decided I would speak to hunger.  

I thought about world hunger.  Too much information, no way to do it justice in a 5 minute speech.  

What about hunger in Kentucky? I thought.  It’s relevant and it’s real. And I was off to the races. 

But after beginning my research I decided to narrow that focus even more and focus just on Lexington and Fayette County. 

The first thing I realized I had to do was reframe my thinking about hunger and expand my vocabulary and my mind.  While I have been hungry I have never been HUNGRY, as in, where will my next meal come from.  This is known as food insecurity and in my entire privileged, middle class existence I have never spent a moment truly in fear and worried about not having enough food to survive.  My hunger truly is, I am embarrassed to admit, a first world problem.

But the hunger I am addressing is the same kind of hunger facing the 9 million people who die each year world wide because of hunger.  The tricky thing about hunger in America is that it doesn’t look anything like hunger in 3^rd world countries.  Only in America, could food insecurity lead to obesity.

And the most ironic part of my research into hunger is that it is a completely man made problem- we ALREADY produce enough food to feed every person on the planet- but that is a subject for another speech.

I’m a numbers guy.  I prefer math and science over social studies and - Sorry Mr. Logsdon- English.  I play football and baseball, both sports that live and die by stats, especially baseball.  I’ll take an equation to solve any day if it means I don’t ever have to write a key-term for A-PUSH and let me complete a lab and never write an essay again. I like to justify my bias by saying I am a left-brained person, I like logic and empirical evidence.  If I were being completely honest I would admit that mostly - I just don’t like to read or write. Because I am more comfortable with numbers I will begin the “official” presentation of my Hunger Speech with some numbers.  But before I get going I have to  tell you- they were NOT what I was expecting. 

1 in 7 adults in Lexington struggle with food insecurity and hunger.  One in seven.  

1 in 5 children- 20% of the children under the age of 18 in this city face hunger and food insecurity each and every day.  In this building that would be approximately 440 students - or almost the entire senior class.  In this class that would translate into roughly 6 people sitting in this room.  

What has stayed with me most is that it is almost statistically impossible for me not to know someone who is dealing with food insecurity and hunger right now at this very moment.

Overall Lexington is a prosperous community.  The banners hanging downtown announce us as a “Top 20” place to live.  Our schools rank among the best in the nation. And yet people are hungry.  How can a wealthy, well educated city in the richest country in the world have children or adults who do not know if or when they will eat next?  How do we justify the waste of over 113 billion pounds of food each year while roughly 17% of Americans are hungry?

And while I just admitted social studies is not my favorite class, I have had great government, world and US history teachers while at Clay and when I think about kids under the age of 18, kids I may know and certainly kids I go to school with who are facing food insecurity I can’t help but think about the government’s obligation to help with this issue.  

Having enough to eat is a basic human right.  It says so in the preamble to the US Constitution stating the fundamental purposes of our government.  The 2^nd to last thing the framers of the constitution charged government to do was promote the general welfare.  

While I worry about my work schedule, my batting average and when I am going to finish my next blog post, these kids are facing the real emergency of figuring out where their next meal is coming from.  

The government has a written and moral imperative to feed these people.  As citizens we need to make our voices heard for those who may not be able to speak for themselves.  They are probably too busy just finding enough food to survive.  

Fayette County Public Schools could expand it’s free lunch program to include all students at all schools, insuring a healthy breakfast and lunch for any hungry child in attendance.  While this doesn’t solve food insecurity for adults and still leaves children in need for evening, weekend and summer meals it is a step in the right direction.  And a step we can take immediately.