you tell me

This is a two month old little girl. I've borrowed the photo from the front page of the November 16, 2009, online edition of the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter. The headline says that a billion people in the world suffer from hunger. And then there is this pull quote from a UN expert: "There is no lack of food, it's a matter of social inequality."

It seemed to me that a mainstream American paper wouldn't use those words, 'social inequality', so to compare I looked up a similar story in the New York Times. It was the only story on global hunger that had a picture. Here is the photo they used:

And here is the quote from their UN expert: “The way we manage the global agriculture and food security system doesn’t work,” said Kostas G. Stamoulis, a senior economist at the organization. “There is this paradox of increasing global food production, even in developing countries, yet there is hunger.”

There you have it. The Swedes call it social inequality. To the Americans, it's a 'paradox'.

When I was a kid there were posters with photos of starving children on them on the walls of the school cafeteria.

No really, there was.

If I didn't know it before, I learned at the age of 7 that I was privileged. And they told me that with privilege comes responsibility. Where does it say that the readers of the New York Times couldn't handle the same truth?