Empty plates raise awareness of world hunger

JEDDAH: “Food for thought,” a collaboration between the Saudi Arabian company Cheil and the UN World Food Program (WFP), is using Instagram to spread its message via social media.
The campaign aims to spread awareness of hunger problems in the MENA region and to support the WFP in building a world with zero hunger by 2030.
It provides a strikingly different fare from the usual Instagram images, for instead of mouth-watering photos of delicious dishes, the campaign features empty plates.
The campaign enlisted 22 calligraphers from four continents and 28 food bloggers to draw attention to the world’s biggest solvable problem, hunger.
Images of empty plates came with messages such as: “Whoever you feed today, might feed you tomorrow,” “A little for you is a lot for them,” and “Hunger is understood in all languages.”
Although humans produce enough food to feed everyone, hunger kills more people each year than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined, according to WFP, affecting the lives of 815 million people worldwide.
Abrar Al-Ghamdi, who works for Cheil as a copywriter, told Arab News: “Instagram has become a food exhibition; people post so many photos of food every day, so we chose to launch the campaign on Instagram to remind people that hunger is still a global problem via engaging some the most-renowned regional food bloggers and their social media audiences.
“The feedback and responses the campaign received were more than our expectation; the posts were shared so many times. The WFP MENA number of followers doubled,” she added.
Eradicating hunger by 2030 is one of the 17 Global Goals for Sustainable Development to improve people’s lives.
The WFP is the world’s largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger worldwide, and has many projects in the Middle East. It provides cash and delivers food to millions of people in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, as well as helping Syrian refugees in neighboring countries rebuild their lives.