Hunger Never Saw Bad Bread

After the premier’s first address to the nation, every Pakistani is well aware of the malnourishment phenomena and how severely it is impacting our future generations. Here a few stunning facts about stunted growth by a reputable news agency. “Pakistan has been reported to have one of the highest levels of prevalence of child malnutrition compared to other developing counties. According to the National Nutrition Survey, 33% of all children were underweight, nearly 44% were stunted, 15% are wasted, 50% were anemic (iron deficiency)”.

We are all surrounded by people who work from day and night, from the chilly winters’ nights to the baking summer heat, from little children who should be playing with toys to old women who can barely walk, all laboring to earn “three meals a day”. How generic is the word meal for us. No questions asked about the taste, and there is no specification of it being balanced diet, neither is there any mention of the carbs or calories it might contain.

Here at NUST hostels, we get up in the morning and have a meal and a hot cup of tea ready for us, then a midday lunch, and it finishes off with the last and the best meal, dinner, at night. This is, in my view, the cause of the problem. There is no effort whatsoever required. We just go and eat. That’s all. This process repeated for a long time, every day, three times a day creates a psychological impact; one tends to forget the effort put into it before you could actually sit back in a cozy place, discuss PSL, and enjoy the sumptuous meal being served to you.

We must constantly remind ourselves of how blessed we are. We are, by no means, better than those laborers who work day and night hardly to eat some sort of food, barely enough to give him the energy to go back again and earn the same meal for the next day.

We owe it to the society to give back. We need to stop wasting food in our mess. You do not like a meal, skip it. There is no point in wasting it. Don’t think that your little meal won’t have an impact, for after all, this is the way to go. This is how we save food, and make the society a better place for the underprivileged- one saved meal at a time.