After my family’s delicious Thanksgiving feast I could not help but reflect on a different, more sparse dinner I had at The World Hunger Banquet a few weeks prior.

Students who attended the banquet were given only a small plate of white rice. My shriveled stomach growled at the unsatisfying supper while I tried to imagine living off this lone meal for a whole day.

The World Hunger Banquet, hosted by the YMCA, was an attempt to give students an idea of what it is actually like to be hungry.

Of course, one hour of hunger is nothing compared to a lifetime of going to bed starving. One inadequate meal cannot compare to the pain of watching your family starve. The primary goal is to spur some action. Americans can help the starving people of the world by changing the government policies that contribute to world hunger.

Right now, Americans across the country are literally burning food in their engines. People hope that ethanol will diminish our dependence on foreign oil.

A fool’s hope.

David Pimental, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell University, said, “If the entire national corn crop were used to make ethanol, it would replace a mere 7 percent of U.S. oil consumption – far from making the U.S. independent of foreign oil.” In 2007, 20 percent of American corn was used to make enough ethanol which replaced 1 percent of total energy usage, Pimental said. For the U.S to be completely fueled by ethanol, 97 percent of the country would have to be covered in cornfields.

Ethanol is also highly inefficient to refine into fuel. In Michael Pollan’s book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” he explains, “When you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry and transport the corn you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it – or around 50 gallons of oil per acre of corn.” He also points out the irony that the machines used to make ethanol use fossil fuels to power them. The conventional wisdom is that it takes more than a gallon of oil to make a gallon of ethanol.

During President Gerald Ford’s administration, Earl Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture, changed the New Deal policy of providing farmers with government subsidies in an attempt to lower food prices. Fast-forward to today and we have an explosion in subsidies for corn. According to the Environmental Working Groups Farm Subsidy Database, corn subsidies in the United States totaled $56.2 billion from 1995-2006. Corn subsidies in Washington alone totaled $67 million from 1995-2006.

Instead of eating much of this corn, we are burning it. And it is having its effect both at home and abroad. The Washington Post reported that U.S. food prices are rising at twice the rate of inflation, forcing some lower-income families to go hungry. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, Washington has a 10 percent food insecurity rate, meaning that 255,000 households are stretched to the point where they cannot be certain that all of their household members will not go hungry.

Aside from striving to change our backwards agricultural policies, supporting both international organizations and local food banks are a great way to make a dent in world hunger. Americans give a lot of lip service to being thankful, but we can do more than talk. Put your money where their mouth is and save some lives.