Now that's just sick....

I'm at the gym the other day trying to sweat off a few pounds on the stair climber and the treadmill and other trainers and what does ESPN have on the tube? The Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest for this year. Again, this guy, Takeru Kobayashi, won the thing by eating 53 3/4 hot dogs in 12 minutes. To watch this guy cram Nathan's dogs (and the buns) in his grill in 12 minutes was something else. It was like watching a car wreck.

I have to watch what I eat. I can't eat just anything and hope to stay in my clothes. And I have to work out - at least three times a week just to maintain my weight. But I love good food. So to see these dudes - and ladies I might add - shoving dozens of hot dogs down their throats and dipping the buns in water or lemonade or something else to help them choke down the sausages, was a bit much.

There was an American guy - Joey Chestnut - who ate 52 dogs and a diminutive woman known as "the Black Widow" aka Sonya Thomas who ate 37 of the frankfurters.

Bread for the World International and the World Food Program say that of the nearly six-and-one-half billion people in the world today, 852 million people across the world are hungry, up from 842 million a year ago. Of that total, more than 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes--one child every five seconds.

The World Food Program has a map that shows some of the places in the world that are most in need of food aid. It's telling, and it's in color.

WFP also has something called "Counting the Hungry" which is an interactive tool that illustrates and illuminates the world hunger problem.

I wonder what it would look like if on our computers, every five seconds we had a graphic where a child's face turned to a skeleton and disappeared. And we couldn't get rid of it. It just stayed there. I wonder how long we would watch - or God help us if we would become hardened to it and not even notice after a while.

Look, I don't want to sound condemnatory; I was just repelled by watching Kobayashi stuff his grill with enough food to feed a village - even if it is crappy food. Some say the problem is not a food problem - we have enough to feed people. The problem is distribution of the food we have. But I have to ask myself "what have you done to solve the problem?"