You people throwing away food make me sick.
Thinking about this as an adult vs. hearing that argument as a kid:
1. You can't ship your food to that kid; no one is directly impact by you
not over-eating - you've already helped the local economy by buying the food (restaurant, workers, & suppliers) and you're helping your health by not over-indulging on calories. Plus food is bio-degradable, so you're not harming the environment by disposing of it. Essentially zero loss by letting the food "go to waste".
2. You can donate to say Africa's cause, which may or may not make it to help that kid in the picture. And it only temporarily satisfies the hunger issue to those specifically getting food deliveries, but doesn't permanently fix the problem because, based on the marketing, it typically goes to donating foodstuffs rather than say farm equipment & training for skills to grow food themselves. And there is rampant & well-documented mis-use of donation funds in the world, so you have no guarantee that donating is doing anything other than alleviating your first-world guilt, assuming you donate when advertised to rather than out of the blue of your own free will.
3. We have
more than enough food to feed the world, it's the distribution of the food that is the problem. There is a huge misconception that there is a food shortage. We already grow enough food to feed 10 billion people and we only have 7 billion people alive right now. Plus there's stuff like Soylent, MRE's, canned food with 40-year shelf-lives, controlled indoor hydroponics & aquaponics systems with LED growlights for continuous, replicatable output, and other technologies that we could put into place with the donated funds.
4. You can go on a charity crusade, but you'll never be able to help all of the people with food security in the world, so ultimately it would only be a small pool of people. And you could easily neglect those under your direct responsibility doing so - yourself, your family, and your community. Not many people even volunteer at their local soup kitchens, let alone drop everyone to go help people in difficult situations in other countries, especially when so many here in the states are struggling with food insecurity. If everyone helped out their own community, we wouldn't have any of these issues because everyone would be making sure everyone else was taken care of. The problem really boils down to selfishness, especially by the dictators preventing aid from getting to the people inside their countries.
Ultimately, is it a waste to throw uneaten food away? Sure. But it's going to go bad anyway, and why waste your time eating something you don't want to eat and making your health worse by over-eating just because mentally you don't want to "waste" the food and feel guilted into finishing a meal, which is really just over-consumption that contributes to poorer health? And I'm not saying you shouldn't donate or help out in some way, because even small contributions of time, money, effort, or resources are useful, but throwing away vs. eating the extra pizza isn't going to help the kid in the picture's cause one way or another, and being judgmental of people who make decisions like that helps even less. Plus there's this problem:
http://gadling.com/2008/04/01/starving-kids-in-china-growing-tired-of-us-leftovers/
:awe: