Of Cat Food and World Hunger

This past year, our family became the delighted owner of a playful, life-celebrating kitten--the fuzzy kind that sleeps at your shoulder and wakes you with a nuzzle on the chin.

Shortly afterward, I went to buy the kitten’s food at the supermarket. Strolling there along an aisle overflowing with cans, boxes and hefty bags of food “with all the high protein your pet needs,” a strange and unsettling vision lurched into my mind.

Flanked by colorful walls of nutritious pet food, I remembered a little boy named Igwe, who lived in a thatch hut behind my cinder-block Peace Corps house years ago.

Igwe’s stomach always bulged unnaturally, like his playmates’. His malady, I discovered, stemmed not from overeating, as I had naively thought at first, but from malnutrition--that is, from not getting all the high protein a human needs. One day, Igwe came to me with a broad smile on his face, to tell me the good news that his father had bought the family a puppy at the local market.

“That’s wonderful!” I exclaimed. “You’ll enjoy that, won’t you?”

“Yes!” he burst out, his eyes dancing. “Father says we can cook it this weekend”’

“What?” I blurted out, astonished. For a painful, embarrassing moment, I stood there lost in a new and terrifying world. Here was a little boy for whom meat at dinner was a rare and special event. And there I was, a man who had so taken for granted his material comfort that he had allowed his riches to blind him to the suffering of others.

“I . . . I’m happy for you,” I fumbled, reaching out awkwardly to pat Igwe on the shoulder.

And years later as I reached out for that box of “100% nutritionally complete kitty dinner,” I prayed as awkwardly for forgiveness.

Still, I struggle. Yes, people in other parts of the world die from lack of the same protein that gives my cat the furry coat I enjoy. Many people. Certainly, I would never kill someone in order to keep my pet cat, no matter how much I enjoy it. And yet, while I feed my kitten, someone across the globe starves.

Neither, I suspect, would any of my fellow Americans kill to keep our coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco, rubber tires or cocoa. Yet in nations where malnutrition and starvation rule, thousands of acres of farmland are preempted by such non-nutritious export crops--for us and the well-fed dictators who order it.

The line between selfishness and enjoying God’s good blessings, therefore, would seem to lie here: Material security and comfort are unjust insofar as they cause us to forget the God who provides them and, thereby, those who suffer without them.

With these parameters in mind, a few days after buying my first pet food I prayed again, asking God not just to forgive me for my insensitivity to others’ suffering, but to show me something to do in response. Not long after, I thought to keep account in the year ahead of how much I spend on cat food and to give that same amount to a world hunger fund.