I was listening to a podcast the other day called "Kale vs Cow: An Animal Loving Farmer's Case for Eating Meat" – don't worry, I am not going to get into the argument for or against any type of diet but I do want to talk about the privilege we have to even be able to choose our diet. 

In the podcast, Luke Storey (the host) and Diana Rodgers (the guest) spoke about how we have more privilege than ever before when it comes to food. They spoke about how hundreds of years ago, you had to grow or hunt the food that you ate. There was no choosing between Trader Joe's or Whole Food for grocery shopping. No second guessing about "which diet is best?"–you just ate what you had in order to survive. 

People still are fighting for nourishment

Comparing ourselves to our ancestors hundreds of years ago isn't really productive since things have changed A LOT since back then. But we–when I say we, I mean the majority of foodies, people reading this article, people who can afford to buy their almond milk lattes every morning, go to Soul Cycle, and grocery shop at more than one store–can compare ourselves to the millions of people in the world affected by food deserts, poverty, and malnutrition. 

It was estimated that about 11% of the world population is starving. Not just hungry like you feel after a really hard workout, but starving and in a lot of cases, malnourished. This can be really hard to wrap your head around and it's often something none of us ever think about. To bring it slightly closer to home, according to dosometing.org, about 23.5 million people live in food deserts and most of those people are low-income. Food deserts "are geographic areas where access to affordable, healthy food options (aka fresh fruits and veggies) is limited or nonexistent because grocery stores are too far away."

Just because we are not still fighting for our food and nourishment doesn't mean that other people aren't. The access to healthy food and just food in general is abundant across the world and even the United States.

So, what can we do about this?

While I am not proposing us to go back to growing all of our food, I am writing this to hopefully help bring awareness to the privilege that many of us have in several aspects of our life. In some ways, it makes me upset at how naïve I could be to not even be aware of how privileged I am to be sitting at an internship typing on my laptop. I hardly even step back and realize how lucky I am to be able to go on to Yelp and choose what restaurant I go to dinner to. 

Privilege is a touchy subject that people in our society really don't want to talk about. It's not something easy to talk about but at least being aware is a good first step. So the next time you complain about Whole Foods being out of your favorite brand of almond butter, take a step back and just be grateful that you're in the place to "get upset" over these kind of things. #FirstWorldProblems am I right?