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The Life You Can Save has recently joined the Enough Food For Everyone IF campaign. The name is often abbreviated to "the IF campaign", but I prefer to abbreviate it to "the Enough Food For Everyone campaign". Because there's enough food for everyone. No IFs, no BUTs. There's enough food for everyone…we're just not sharing it out fairly. But we should! People have understood this for centuries:
"… whatever a man has in superabundance is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance. So Ambrosius says, and it is also to be found in the Decretum Gratiani: "The bread which you withhold belongs to the hungry: the clothing you shut away, to the naked: and the money you bury in the earth is the redemption and freedom of the penniless." (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Q 66 A 7).
"Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same." (Luke 3:11).
I represented The Life You Can Save at an "Enough Food For Everyone" event in Westminster last week, then I attended the 45,000-strong rally in Hyde Park the following day…and I think that the most sensible and profound thing that I heard over those whole two days was from that adorable kid from Outnumbered: "I'm 13 and I think we can eradicate hunger, so why don't we just do it?"
At the end of the day, the motivation to give really is that simple – it is just the recognition that there is more food on my plate than yours, so to speak, and so I should give you some of mine. Perhaps it turns out that the best channels for "sharing your plate" involve an integrated approach to campaigning, disaster relief, education, health, women's rights etc., or perhaps they involve straightforwardly giving your money to the poor. Either way, it starts with the simple thought that, if I have 100 times as much money as you, I should be trying to help you.
Unfortunately, I don't think that the "Enough Food For Everyone" name will catch on. If I talk about "the EFFE campaign" I just sound strangely Scottish, and "Enough Food For Everyone" is too much of a mouthful.
