FROM THE FIELD: Chicken wings, hunger and the Super Bowl

A split image showing men eating snacks from a bowl on the left, and children in line holding plates on the right.

Unsplash/WFP Americans spent more than $17 billion on 2020 Super Bowl parties.

FROM THE FIELD: Chicken wings, hunger and the Super Bowl

6 February 2021 Humanitarian Aid

The amount of money spent on food and beverages to enjoy, perhaps, the United States’ most high-profile annual sporting event, adds up to more than twice the global budget of the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), according to the agency.

WFP says Americans spent around $17 billion on food, drinks, party supplies and other paraphernalia to mark the 2020 Super Bowl, the flagship event of the American football season, and in the process consumed a stomach-churning 1.3 billion chicken wings and almost 900 million pints of beer.

A collage of food scenes: fried chicken and a Budweiser beer on the left, and a woman serving food to a child on the right. — The money spent by US companies on TV advertisements during the Super Bowl is enough to feed 690 million hungry people around the world. **Unsplash/WFP**

An estimated 130-140 million people around the world are expected to tune into the game which takes place on Sunday, similar to the number of hungry people worldwide who WFP are hoping to reach with food aid in 2021.

Read more here about how the Super Bowl-inspired feast of over-consumption relates to the global challenge of feeding the world’s hungriest people.

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News Tracker: Past Stories on This Issue

WFP aid worker Liberée Kayumba poses for a photo inside a temporary shelter in a refugee camp in Rwanda.

FROM THE FIELD: The genocide survivor helping others avoid starvation

7 January 2021

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During the 1994 Genocide Against The Tutsi In Rwanda, Liberee Kayumba avoided starvation thanks to emergency rations from the World Food Programme (WFP). Today, she is helping to ensure that Burundian refugees in the country have enough to eat.

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FROM THE FIELD: Ugly veggies in Kenya destined for lunch not landfills

23 August 2020

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Hundreds of tons of fresh and edible vegetables which are typically dumped because they do not meet the aesthetic requirements for export are ending up on the plates of hungry Kenyan students thanks to the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP).