When the UN World Food Programme (WFP) sends baskets of food to families in need around the world they generally supply enough for two meals per person. Rice is the staple ingredient. It takes 200 grams of rice to make up the necessary calories for one meal—that’s about 9,600 grains total.
Imagine scooping that rice from a bag you purchased at the grocery store. When you drop all 9,600 grains into a pot, they barley fill it. In America, the land of piled dinner plates, this helping likely looks like one instead of two. In the realm of scooping rice from easily replenished plastic bags and brand named sacks, curiosity aside, there is little reason to count the individual grains. Yet, for hungry people across the globe this handful of food is a precious commodity.
How do we qualify hunger? Argue if you will—but it seems that for most of us, our daily perception is grossly limited. Most days the thought of skipping breakfast and not eating until 1 or 2PM feels like grounds for starvation. Yet, there are moments when we are forced to encounter graver alternatives.
I remember one evening when I truly encountered hunger for the first time while I was living in Boston. I had left work an hour late, and all I wanted was to get home because I was “starving.” Until I rounded the sidewalk to the subway station entryway and saw a young girl who looked to be in her early 20s, about my age, shove her entire arm into a garbage pail outside the door. I watched her grinning hugely as she pulled an untouched cherry Danish from the bottom. She gave it a quick shake to remove any excess refuse, then shoved almost the entire pastry into her mouth.
Before seeing the girl I had been contemplating what I would make to alleviate my “hunger” and how I wanted spend the evening once my stomach was full, whether reading a book or watching a favorite show. After seeing her I couldn’t get past the fact that on any given day there are people who spend all of their time longing and searching for something as simple as food to eat. I began to wonder—how desperate would I have to be to find my dinner in a garbage pail? How desperate are those who don’t even have that option?
For a long time after seeing that girl I wanted to find a way to help overcome hunger on a more constant basis than participating in food drives and contributing to donation centers alone. One day a friend who had been studying for the GRE suggested I check out a website called Freerice.com that he’d been using to boost his vocabulary.
If you’re not familiar with Freerice.com it is a non-profit online initiative to promote learning and stop hunger. The website offers free learning resources to visitors, which are designed to grow in difficulty based on the individual users’ performance, including a brain stumping comparative vocabulary challenge and grammar quiz, as well as trivia in the humanities, math, chemistry, geography, language learning, science, and even SAT prep.
How does Freerice.com fight hunger? In collaboration with the UN World Food Programme, which also owns the website, Freerice donates 10 grains of rice to the WFP for every correct answer given by a quiz participant. Freerice generates its income for donations from the sponsors and advertisers along its web pages. For players, the intellectual benefits of the games and empowering images of earned rice grains piling into a wooden bowl are motivation to score high and make the highest donations possible.
The original pilot for this program, FreeRice.com, was launched in 2007 by creator John Breen, who donated the site to the WFP in 2009. The site was then re-launched in a 2.0 version under the slightly altered name of Freerice.com (note the small caps r), which offers users new social media and networking opportunities, including the option to make a Freerice profile that tracks game playing and scores and allows users to make friends and join Freerice groups. The “Spread The Word” link on the website header offers opportunities to follow and share social media banners and images for “I Rice Up Against Hunger!,” Freerice’s social media slogan.
While Freerice.com has been around the cyber sphere for a while, with over one million players, it is still gaining news coverage as well as new and renewed interest. Fans of the books and major motion picture The Hunger Games may be aware of the movie cast teaming up with Freerice in a Hunger Games campaign to fight world hunger, which leading actress Jennifer Lawrence powerfully describes as “one of the world’s most solvable problems.” The Hunger Games website offers a video, hunger quiz and online donation opportunities. For fans and newcomers to the Hunger and Freerice games alike it’s definitely worth a visit.
Through its strong social media coverage and the participation and word-of-mouth promotion of its many users, Freerice.com has succeeded in donating enough rice to feed millions of people around the world. And, by the looks of the Freerice following and “I Rice Up Against Hunger!” campaign, it looks like this site is just getting started.
I encourage fellow Scribblers to Rice Up Against Hunger! and to use the vocabulary and grammar quizzes on Freerice to write on and write strong. Test and tease your brain! By challenging yourself to learn new words and often realize grammatical mishaps you didn’t notice you were making (the grammar quiz goes up to Level 5, so don’t think it will be too easy!) you’ll be sure to expand the ways that you communicate and think about language learning, reading, and writing.
On the sidebar of each page Freerice gives the important forewarning that its games may increase your intelligence and improve your communication and problem solving skills—that’s the price you have to pay to help fight world hunger! Freerice.com is an ingenious reminder to make the most of the time we have by working to improve our intellectual well being and social consciousness.
Knowledge is power to change the world—Freerice.com is proof.
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