Dan Haseltine – One Sentence

The conversation about nutrition takes on many different categories and it covers a lot of ground from America’s urban school cafeterias where our processed and packaged foods have created an epidemic mostly made manifest as a plague of obesity and diabetes, to the war-torn deserts of Yemen and South Sudan where the problem is flipped onto its belly taking the form of dire scarcity. It is tragic on both sides, and begs for a hard look at our conscience and our ability to stomach actions that are transcendent of political affiliation. Sometimes we need only to feel the weight of real people who are suffering for a lack of resources that we have in such astounding abundance that the very abundance has led us toward our own graves, in order to open our hands and mouths to inspire change.

I walked the halls on Capitol Hill. I walked into the offices of people who spend their days raising lots of money for political parties; offices where displays were stocked with snack foods manufactured in the respective States and Districts. I sat with pastors and authors and lobbyists to bring up the subject of nutrition.

In the back of my mind, I kept that sentence close. It was underneath every handshake, and woven into the tone of every brief introduction. “Hi, my name is Dan Haseltine. I am the singer for a band called Jars Of Clay, and the founder of an organization that works to help people in Africa have clean water.” And so on, and so forth…

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The foundational motivation that kept coming up in the meetings, from government agencies to the offices of senators and house representatives was that caring for people who were hungry, at least with regards to the international community, was best framed in the rhetoric of national security. In other words, we should help people who are hungry so that they will not be mad and hurt us later.

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