Hunger banquet modeled after NGO campaign dedicated to staving off hunger
By Lauren Searson, staff writer
Posted on April 27, 2006

Raising awareness for international, local economic and nutrition disparities, JMU’s eighth annual Hunger Banquet was held last night in the Highlands Room.

The event, which has been in the works since last semester, was planned by a committee of Community Service-Learning students. The banquet is the final event of the “Hunger Knows No Boundaries” food drive that kicked off Feb. 28.  Last year’s Hunger Banquet raised $70, which was given to Mercy House, along with all canned food donations.

Senior Chelsea Skotchdopole, the Hunger Banquet committee chair, said, “The event is modeled after a campaign led by Oxfam, an international non-governmental organization dedicated to eliminating hunger and poverty throughout the world.”
 
CSL associate director Lorelei Esbenshade said, “Each year we have a large turnout. I believe that all who attend leave with a lot of information and issues to talk about and wrestle with.”

When students arrived at the banquet, they were given a program with facts about hunger, as well as life-cards that featured a profile of a high, middle or low-income individual.

According to Skotchdopole, people received different types of meals based on a randomly-assigned socio-economic status. Representing the lowest economic level, 55 percent of the attendees received rice and colored water, which represented contaminated water. The middle class, representing 30 percent of the population, received beans, rice, water and lemonade, while the wealthiest 15 percent received a menu that consisted of sandwiches, fruit and dessert.

After the meal, the students engaged in a reflection period. Skotchdopole said, “Sometimes participants in the upper class give food to the lower class, but then we question whether this is what realistically happens.”

Two brief videos from the Internet were also shown to participants. In the first film, titled “The World in 10 Seconds,” participants were asked to hold their breath for 10 seconds and learned a wide range of statistics of what occurred during that amount of time. 

For example, four people died from hunger-related causes and two people died from drinking bad water. The second film, “If There Were Only 100 People,” showed what the world would be like if this was the population. The richest person in the world would earn more than the incomes of the 57 poorest individuals.
 
 According to the CSL Hunger Banquet Web site, more than 840 million people worldwide are malnourished. Locally, approximately 16,500 people receive assistance in a given week from the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank Network.

Although the banquet was free, participants were encouraged to bring canned foods or make donations, all of which went to the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank. As a part of the event’s closing, they were told other ways they could make a difference in fighting hunger and poverty.

Skotchdopole said the program was also done to raise awareness about the Millennium Developmental Goals. Among these is the current fight to receive 1 percent, or about $25 billion of the federal budget, in order to help fight world poverty and AIDS.