Feeling the Bite of Lesson on Hunger

[MountainLaurel]

As he watched classmate Elizabeth Mason take a sip from a glass goblet, Ian Glasgow could stand it no longer.

"There are three empty spots with salads just sitting there," Glasgow moaned, staring at the plastic cup of rice on his lap. "There is so much food over there, and we're getting almost nothing."

Inequity was the theme of the unusual dinner party on the campus of St. Mary's College of Maryland on Wednesday evening. At the campus in Southern Maryland, Mason and four other students, randomly selected from the participants as high-income guests, ate a three-course meal at a linen-covered table.

Across the room, Glasgow and eight others chosen to represent the estimated 60 percent of the world's residents who make $3 or less per person per day sat on the floor scooping brown rice out of plastic cups with their fingers. In the center of the room, those representing the global middle class ate rice and beans with forks. The goal: to experience the problem of world hunger firsthand, if only for two hours.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/30/AR2006113001332.html