World Hunger and Poverty Blog

For the past 5+ years, I have made my home in Japan. I started my adventure in a very conservative, rural area filled with traditional Japanese customs, and eventually I settled into a fast-paced metropolitan lifestyle in the suburbs of Tokyo. Language barriers aside, you can imagine that I have experienced more than my fair share of culture shock.

About once a year, I return to my hometown in Memphis, Tennessee, to visit with family and re-convince them that I am perfectly fine living on my own in a foreign land. I laugh off attempts at guilt trips and make excuses as to why I need to stay in Japan just one more year. Or two.

The truth is: when I go back to America, I feel more culture-shocked than when I am in Japan, and it all revolves around one thing.

Waste.

I am appalled at how wasteful Americans are. I don’t mean to stereotype or generalize here, but I’m seriously speaking from what I have witnessed with my own two eyes. Americans are wasteful.

Think about it. How much food do you purchase or prepare that ends up in the trash? How often do you order an extra large drink from the drive-thru only to pour out half of its watered-down remains? When you eat at a restaurant, how much food goes untouched on your plate? Do you always take home your leftovers? If you do, how often do you really eat them?

In Japan, it is customary to eat everything given to you at a meal. There are no such things as “doggie-bags” or “take-out boxes” in restaurants because no one ever leaves any leftovers. Yes, the portion sizes are smaller, but only to reduce wasting food that can’t be eaten at the meal.

I also once witnessed a waitress refuse to accept a young girl’s order because she didn’t believe that the girl would be able to eat it all. The girl simply replied, “Oh, right.” And then ordered something more size-appropriate for her petite frame.

In some all-you-can-eat restaurants/buffets, patrons are charged an additional fee if they put food on their plates and do not eat it. I’m not even kidding. I can’t imagine that would go over well in the US.

I could expand into other categories as well. Clothing. Fuel. Electricity. Bath water. But it’s the food that gets me the most. I feel physically ill watching all that food being thrown in the trash without a second thought, and the Japanese word mottainai [“What a waste!”] screams inside my head. If Scott were writing this, he might point out how 18,000 children die every year from hunger. Yet here we are, throwing away however many pounds of food a day just because our eyes are bigger than our stomachs.

Yes, we need food to survive. But how much do we really need?

Not as much as we take, that’s for sure.

Guest post by Sheeraz Khan, author of The World Is In Me

First thing what comes to my mind when I think of Arab world is Dubai or Kuwait. What it would be like going to a place where the definition of Heaven on Earth defines. Where an average citizen not only drives in Ferrari but also has a lion or tiger pub as a pet. Women are compared to Angels especially their ferocious eyes are no less than hypnotizing and driving a Hummer car in desert will leave you with feeling that you conquered the world.

It’s always magical to have a visit to the place which turned itself into world’s most developed city(Dubai) from being just a desert or a land known just for selling dates and camels to the outsiders. Coming back home from the ‘bright side’ of Arab leaves you with a feeling that life is beautiful and you wish what if your whole life is just like this. Having a business not with many risks, sufficient money to feed your generations to come, 3 or 4 beautiful wives among whom no one having trouble with another one because you treat them equally, luxurious cars, villas, polo and what not. Just Google for the image of an arab stud or a beautiful women, seeing their face itself gives you an instinct idea like.. . what if having a life like that or you wonder how crazy they enjoy their routine life in a buffet way.

But just like every coin has the other side as well the other side of arab is not this lavish. Forget lavish it’s a battle surviving every day. Leaving Dubai might give you ecstacy but leaving Syria or Palestine wont let you stop wondering that life is a nightmare.

Putting aside whatever the government decisions were from the western side or the Arab rulers deciding their own people fate, whatever happening in the dark side of Arab world is no less than a war against innocent people. Did they ever wanted any of this? Did they imagine that their children one day will have to see a situation where they’ll be leaving their homes, there everything where they grew up and dreamed of living a normal life and fly away to other countries as refugees with no guarantee for their future or their own life. Whoever is responsible which I seriously don’t want to know because there ain’t any conclusion but onething I know is that the common people are suffering for food and basic requirements. The governments blame one another and ISIS is doing everything they would have done to spread terror sometimes I wonder is ISIS having more weapons than U.S and Russia or is it there terror mind turned more confident and brave than our leaders.

We have fallen to an extent where people want to give up religious faith because it is no more considered good to believe in someone helping us from above the skies (nothing is worst than losing faith in something beyond creation) because they think it is the root cause for all human destruction.
We send funds and charity organizations do their best to feed the hungry mankind living in fear. Celebrities and rich people sitting in royalty send millions but I don’t think it will solve the problem unless we succeed in realizing the one who is responsible behind all the chaos happening. If we don’t do that surely a day will come when we’ll be feeling sorry for not doing something useful at right time.

We believed in God when we wanted something for ourselves or our loved ones and took it for granted now that we are seeing someone behind the masks destructing humanity we are considering God’s religion to be a root cause for destruction of world peace (such a shame).
Did’nt you ever feel like there are people in our society who are using religion or democracy as a shield to satisfy their egoistic or satanic (dirty mind) needs?

May be its time that we should start blaming them just like if am a bad man its because I choose to be bad but not because of my parents similarly, lets blame the one who is trying to divide us not the religion or human values which are meant to unite us. See the difference

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Books by Sheeraz Khan

The World Is In Me ~ View on Bookshelves | View on Amazon

Guest post by Andrew James Archer, author of Pleading Insanity

I think one of the main reasons American’s mental health is so impoverished has to do with the dominant perception on “mental illness” being similar to physical diseases or infections. We are culturally dependent on psychotropic medications partially due to viewing “mental illness” as an external concept or a tangible and separate entity from the individual.

Consider aspects of the website for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). It lists a series of disorders (e.g., ADHD, Autism, Bipolar Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Depression, OCD, PTSD, Schizophrenia, etc.) under the column heading “Mental Illness.”

The website defines “mental illness” as “a condition that impacts a person’s thinking, feeling or mood and may affect his or her ability to relate to others and function on a daily basis.”

This implies that the “condition” is separate from the individual and has an impact on how they are able to function.

As a psychotherapist, I frequently hear people describe their experience using diagnostic language. It is common for someone to say “my ADHD” or “my depression” or “my bipolar” that is the culprit for how they feel and behave.

The NAMI site goes on to say that mental health conditions “go beyond these emotional reactions and become something longer lasting.” The description did not offer a specific differentiation from emotional responses and disorders, but it notes that these are “medical conditions that cause changes in how we think and feel and in our mood.”

Think about this for a second.

Imagine you have a disease. You need to go to an established practitioner in order to confirm the diagnosis. The diagnosis is based on a set of criteria (i.e., symptoms). Once this is verified, an intervention is presented.

The intervention is meant to address the symptoms of the disease for eventual elimination.

Now, imagine this process as a road. Within the road you have these three paths: the disease, the illness and the intervention.

At some point, the intervention is supposed to relieve the symptoms and if you do not have symptoms then the disease is gone. There is no longer a need for the intervention. However, with mental health concerns there is no clear disease.

There are no objective medical tests such as blood draws or brain scans that are able to identify “mental illness.” Instead, practitioners are forced to discern and interpret subjective experience while formulating a diagnosis. In fact, one cannot even identify the mind scientifically. Oxidation levels in various areas of the brain are detectable, which tend to represent thoughts, but the actual mechanism for how neuronal firings create the mind is a mystery.

What we are able to do is correlate brain activity with perceived mental states (usually constructed in research laboratories).
Without a tangible test, it is not clear the trajectory of the course. And, if you take away the intervention and symptoms resurface, it could be interpreted as: (a) the disease was never cured (b) that the intervention was working or (c) the intervention created a disturbance. This uncertainty around cause and effect is the chink in Psychiatry’s armor.

For example, say Joe is depressed and is prescribed an antidepressant medication. Joe’s ostensible disease is “depression” and the symptoms are what make up the criteria for a major depressive episode (e.g., pervasive sadness, insomnia, anhedonia, etc.). The intervention is the antidepressant medication. If the person has less symptoms of depression while taking the medication then the intervention tends to confirm the disease (i.e., the person was depressed). Now that the person is no longer experiencing symptoms of depression, one avenue to travel could be titrating off the medication.

However, if depression symptoms return after the titration, Joe is left with a tricky interpretation.

Are the symptoms returning because the person “needs” the medication? Is this a return of the “disease”? In other words, does the return of symptoms seemingly confirm that the person needed the medication?

Another scenario is that the intervention (e.g., the antidepressant) creates a dependency over time. The idea that the brain starts to compensate for alterations in serotonergic pathways (i.e., from SSRI medication). The imbalances due to these changes leads to a more chronic course of depression that builds immunity to medicinal cures.

This would be considered an iatrogenic process, whereby the treatment or intervention relates to the actual illness it is trying to eradicate. The road to a cure begins to look like a circular track or habitual pattern.

And if that is true, then we might all soon be sick.

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Books by Andrew James Archer

Pleading Insanity ~ View on Bookshelves | View on Amazon