In the US, over 20 million children receive free or reduced-price lunch each school day. Less than half of them get breakfast, and only 10% have access to summer meal sites (dosomething.org).
In 2013, 49.1 million Americans lived in food insecure households, including 33.3 million adults and 15.8 million children (feedingamerica.org). In the world 795 million people are estimated to suffer from chronic malnourishment; that’s one in nine people in the world from 2012-14 (fao.org).
According to a recent report by UNEP and the World Resources Institute (WRI), about one-third of all food produced worldwide, worth around US$1 trillion, gets lost or wasted in food production and consumption systems (worldfooddayusa.org) A third of all deaths in children under the age of five in developing countries are linked to under nutrition (source: IGME, 2011). Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa have the largest number of people who suffer from hunger in the world; two out of three people who are undernourished live in Asia (worldhungar.org).
This piece has been forged out of a single copper rod. I chose the form of a spoon because it’s easily identified as an eating utensil throughout the world. I forged the handle of the spoon into the form of a torso ravaged by starvation. The torso then transitions into two wings to represent an angel of death, which I made to be highly stylized in order to convey the horrors of dying by starvation.