It is just obscenely wrong....

When I was in my early primary years in the early ‘90s I saw pictures which are new but familiar as those I saw when I was in my pre- school. Stark images of children with protruding ribs and distended stomachs, their sad eyes pleading into the camera. Families crawling on parched earth in search of water and food. People shrinking into human skeletons.

Mama: Those are people and children of Africa starving, their land is without rain for two years and besieged by ongoing conflicts that have ravaged food production and infrastructure and impeded aid and  the famine spreading touching many parts of East African lands. Tens of thousands of people, mostly children, have already died and there are an estimated 12 million people on the brink of starvation.

During that crisis, images of the starving prompted a mass outpouring of support from around the globe and inspired fundraising efforts like the celebrity recording of We Are the World. It will be interesting to see how the world responded that time.

The images of those people left my mind as I was busy with my study schedules in high school, pre U and university years. And in the past two decades I grew up with the rise of up-sizing, super-sizing and all-you-can-eat options at restaurants and fast-food outlets, and overeating and overindulgence have become increasingly normalized. Obesity is increasingly becoming an epidemic and food waste has reached staggering proportion, the crucial situation in East Africa is hard to comprehend.

More and more Malaysians are keeping awake till late to indulge in what is becoming a top national pastime – tucking it in at 24-hour eating joints, practically eating round-the-clock  at mamak shops close to and way past midnight  to satisfy the cravings of Malaysians who are gorging on calorie-packed late night meals with hardly a care – and getting obese in the process.

Statistics show that the prevalence of obesity among Malaysian adults increased by a staggering 250% over a 10-year period from 1996 while the number of overweight has increased by 70%.

Besides, about 38% of youngsters aged between 12 and 18 were classified as overweight.

It is time for us to focus on moderate eating, less waste and an appreciation of the bounty of food that is readily available to us.

Not everyone is so lucky.

Mothers in Southern Sudan are feeding their children leaves to stop them starving to death. They crushed foliage torn from trees then boiled it over fires outside their huts, draining the green-tinged water before their children devoured their sole meal for the day with their hands. They’ll get diarrhea from eating these but chomping on bitter leaves used as food is of last resort in here. We seen how thin they are and this is all they have had to eat since I don’t really know when.

One four-year-old boy sprawled naked on the earth after collapsing from hunger, his breath coming in faint gasps after refusing to eat the leaves as other infants wailed with hunger in the shade of a nearby tree.

Maybe someone knows more than I do about this—what I see here is just obscenely wrong.