My neighbors, who belong to the local Rotary Club and are active in a project to end world hunger, showed me the following remarkable statistics:

In the US every year, we spend

• $18 billion on snacks
• $24 billion on candy
• $20 billion on ice cream
• $103 billion on fast food
• $60 billion on soft drinks
• $45 billion on beer
• $33 billion on diets to deal with it all!
• $102 billion on health care for illnesses directly attributable to obesity (actually, I snagged that stat from www.obesity.org)
  

For a total of $405 billion annually (That's billion with a "B").

Now, according to my Rotarian friends, here's the total amount of money needed for one year to eliminate world hunger, hunger-related disease and all diseases against which one can be immunized: $28 billion.

So what's the point? It seems obvious: eat less garbage and donate the money you save to international food and health organizations and . Not a bad idea. But this isn't a rant designed to make you feel personally guilty every time you eat an M&M, thinking about kids starving in Africa. I juxtapose these two statistics - the $405 billion spent on consuming and dealing with the efforts of junk foods and the $28 billion it would take to end world hunger and immunizable disease - to make a couple of bigger points.

First, it's a wakeup call to realize that we live in the richest society in the history of the planet, and we're systematically malnourishing and poisoning ourselves with our food choices. While 1 billiion people will go to bed tonight without enough food in their bellies, we who are fortunate enough to have an abundance of healthy calories at our disposal spurn them for sugar water and the frozen, sweetened, pus-filled baby food of another species.

Second, because we are such huge consumers of the earth's resources, our food choices determine what's grown in the countries where famine rages. We've turned continents into private farms for our favorites: tea, coffee, sugar, peanuts, bananas, pineapples, and beef. Our reliance on meat and dairy means that endless resources - grain, water, sunlight, human labor - must be used to feed a few instead of many. Here's a mind-blowing stat, courtesy of the Center for Science in the Public Interest: it takes 18,000 gallons of water to produce a single pound of beef.

This isn't a zero-sum game: it's not that I'm suggesting we sacrifice so others may eat. If we're concerned about the 24,000 people who die every day from hunger and hunger-related diseases (18,000 of them children under the age of five), we don't have to eat worse or live worse.

On the contrary - only by getting healthier ourselves will we be able to help anyone else. We're all connected. Our addictive, poisonous economy causes suffering in lands that rarely make the evening news, as well as in our own homes and hospitals.