Fighting World Hunger One Food Photo at a Time

It might come at an event when you’re in high school, and the speaker drops the “starving kids in Africa” card, and you’re convicted then of your teenage over-indulgence and self-centeredness. It may come when you spend spring break in Mexico and see the kids you’re ministering to perfectly content with their half-inflated soccer ball and torn sandals, and you return to your house after the trip to give away half of the contents in your closet. Or it may come when you’re sitting at a red light and a man with a sign that reads (homeless will work 4 food) then looks you square in the face as you sip on your latte.

It’s that moment when the desire to actively fight world hunger grips the heart.

Whenever the moment comes, the hard part is moving forward and doing something tangible.

What do you do at that point? How can you fight world hunger when you feel land-locked and without the resources or time to devote to a need so real?

The steps you take can be wide and varied, starting with the homeless shelter in your city to joining a cause on the global scale.

We are not without resources if we only lift our gaze.

One rising and innovative resource in the fight against world hunger is this app. To break it down: You take a picture of whatever you are eating and the app converts the calories you have consumed into a cash value. The cash value can then be donated to the humanitarian organization Action Against Hunger. With as much slack as Instagram users get for their prosaic foodie photographs, the Give Your Calories app seems to be a redemptive element to this popular trend of food photo sharing.

It is a fearful and costly endeavor to actively join the fight against world hunger. If it weren’t a fight, it would be easy, and more people would do it. I’m sitting in a coffee shop today doing some writing. I’m enjoying an iced coffee and a vegan spiced chocolate cookie. As I gaze up from my keyboard, I see a homeless man eating from the trashcan across the street and my heart grows heavy. I can’t forget about him; he is hungry too. I want to minister to this individual and give him a cup of cool water in Jesus’ name. I want this man to walk down to Jefferson Street Baptist Center and utilize the resources available for individuals in need. I can’t do that for everyone I meet. I feasibly cannot do this for anyone outside of Louisville. That’s why I am thankful that an app like this, so that in some small way, even I have a role in meeting needs greater than where my feet and hands can go, in a way that is already part of my day-to-day life.