The best thing a food-lover can do today
Do something good today.... read this!
Did you, like me, suffer a veritable glut of requests on Facebook this year to sponsor some half-friend to limp around the marathon?
A couple of times a day I found I was clicking on that promising red pustule in the top left hand corner of your profile, only to find – instead of a real message from a real friend – there was a round robin email saying something along the lines of “Mikey (who I haven’t seen since I was seven) is running the London marathon in aid of Otters With Depression!!!!!!111”.
Facebook overload
Just as with the clipboard crew in the high street, the problem with the Facebook charidee overload is that you quickly become resentful of any organisation asking you for money.
Instead of thinking carefully about which causes you care about and which you don’t so much, you simply become immune to all of them. A good policy is to pick a couple of charities that you fancy supporting and to stick to them, in which breath I’d also like to suggest you choose Action Against Hunger.
Why? If you are on this website then there’s a good chance you have a particular interest in food. Either that or you were diverted while searching for graphic images involving cucumbers and whipped cream, which I suppose boils down to the same thing. I certainly consider the fact that I work in food, write about food, read about food, talk about food, tweet about food, and of course eat food a true, unbridled joy.
But, without wanting to hack my way through too many charity clichés, there are many who don’t have this luxury.
Action Against Hunger
For thirty years, Action Against Hunger have been helping those people out, providing clean drinking water and food for the hungry, focusing particularly on child hunger, but also on areas of conflict. It’s not for profit, and it’s non-governmental, so fears about where your money is going to end up should, with any luck, be allayed.
Look, I’m not going to get pious about this. Or at least not more pious. To start by yammering on about the tedium of charity overload, only to then overload you with charity propaganda is somewhat hypocritical. But if you are interested in supporting someone then, as the inveterate greedy-guts I bet you are, ACF would be a good place to start.
Blogging greedy-guts in chief The Critical Couple are putting on a barbecue in August in aid of the charity, so you can, if you like, fight hunger by stuffing your face. Last month I put my money where my mouth is and ran the London marathon for ACF (and no, I didn’t have a Facebook page). It wasn’t much fun, but there was a big lunch at the end of it.
If you fancy doing something, why not get in touch with Action Against Hunger. They’re very nice. And not a clipboard in sight.
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