Hungry People Persuasive Essay

Do you know what it feels like to be truly hungry? Have you experienced the deep-seeded fear that arises from not knowing where your next meal is coming from? Luckily, I am not forced to answer “yes” to either of those distressing questions and neither does roughly 79% of the world’s population. However, according to certain statistics, “11.3% of the world’s population” is personally familiar with chronic hunger. To put that figure into perspective, 11.3% of the world’s population boils down to “roughly 805 million people who go undernourished on a daily basis.” (dosomething.org) Eight hundred five million people suffer needlessly says the author of the article because “the world produces enough food to feed all 7 billion people…” (dosomething.org) How is it possible then, that we as people, can possess the resources to feed those millions of hungry people but choose to stand idly by and refuse to help? Sadly, by doing nothing, mankind makes a conscious decision to allow millions of human beings to suffer from malnourishment.

In 2008, McCann Lisbon, an advertisement company in Portugal, created an ad for the VITAE homeless shelter and placed it on the inside of trashcan lids. This ingenious ad displayed a photograph of a typical homeless man,

cropped as a portrait, dressed in a dark beanie, dark jacket, and dark flannel shirt. His beard was unkempt and his eyes were dark and sunken in. His face, mostly hidden beneath the brim of his tattered beanie was dirty and creased with age. The viewer could instantly recognize that the man in the photograph was a victim of chronic poverty and if allowed to consider him long enough, the viewer could potentially conjure an image of someone they had absently passed by during the course of their day. The ad’s background was also dingy and successfully added to the overall feeling of hopelessness and despair. Finally, the viewer’s attention was drawn away from the man’s forlorn gaze and guided toward the simple, solid white letters written slightly off center at the top of the ad, “Help. So that no one has to come here for food.”
At that moment the viewer was forced to realize that they were still holding onto their own trashcan lid! Their gaze would suddenly drop to the bin below where the previous day’s trash lingered in a foul-smelling heap. The viewer’s awareness would be redirected to the trash bag that they held in their opposite hand, the one filled to the brim with new trash. They may find themselves asking, “How could anyone come here looking for a meal? It’s merely a bag of empty tin cans, dirty, half-eaten, food scraps, wet coffee grounds, and decaying banana peels!
A very lucky 79 % of the world’s population will never have to answer the question of just how hungry would they have to be in order to resort to searching in someone’s trashcan to curb their own hunger. Sadly however, for the approximate 805 million men, women, and children who do suffer from homelessness and chronic hunger, neighborhood trashcans may be where they are forced to search for a meal if no one is willing to help.
The McCann Lisbon Advertisement Company did a phenomenal job of appealing to the emotions of its audience.

This very persuasive strategy is referred to as “pathos” in literary terms. The specific goal that advertisers use pathos for is to provoke a feeling of pity and sadness in its viewers. It can be successfully utilized to entice a broad audience to buy a specific product or to pull at the heart strings of consumers hard enough to compel them to donate to a particular cause, or to strongly react to certain stimuli. The straightforward appeal of pathos used in this advertisement created for the VITAE homeless shelter, was to generate an awareness of the disturbing consequences created by ignoring chronic world

hunger.