The Holiday season has just come to a close! Along with the constant bombardment of advertisements for hundreds of products you do not need, came the appeals for charity. When watching our favorite shows, our average day is interrupted by Salvation Army commercials, showing montages of bone-thin children with big doe eyes.

These pleas awaken our conscience, making us feel guilty that we lie in our nice, cozy homes while others go without. So many of us give, go to bed with an easy mind, and repeat the process when we see the next request to “make one call to help end hunger.”

This charity is certainly admirable, but the endless supply of starving children seems to indicate that it isn’t as effective as we would like it to be. This “brute force” method of attempting to end hunger has three gaping holes in it: culture, population growth, and over-consumption.

For the “brute force” method’s first reason of failure, let us consider 19th century Ireland, a place where hunger was rife throughout the whole island. Almost every family scraped by just above starvation, yet it was a widely held practice in Irish culture to have large families.

If a family had eight children, three might die of famine or disease, three might emigrate to America or another country, and two would stay, marry, and start a similarly large family of their own, keeping the population relatively stable.

If, theoretically, Ireland in that time received the kind of support from the rest of the world as many impoverished countries do today, all eight of those children in that family would probably survive, marry, and have children. If support continued, all of their children would survive and have children until people stopped giving, they stopped having such large families, or it was no longer possible to provide food for the population. If the culture of a nation being aided has a tradition of large families, the “brute force” method will not solve the problem, but actually in the long run, make it worse.

This concept is tied to the illusion that increased food production will end hunger. If people don’t have food, then if you make more food everyone will have enough, right? Aside from the previous reasons why this does not solve the problem, it also does not account for over-consumption.

One problem with that theory is that it acts on the assumption that the world does not have enough food to feed everyone. To answer that question, simply fly over the middle of our country, filled with endless rows of corn, so much, in fact, that we burn it at a loss of money to run our cars.

If we develop better farming techniques, better crops, or genetically engineer our food to farm itself, history shows no guarantee that this food will go towards feeding the starving masses. To quote Mohandas Ghandi, “There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.”

The conclusion I find from this evidence is that the problem can be solved, but that it requires a more nuanced approach than it currently receives.

Along with aid, both monetary and donation-oriented, programs intended to address worldwide hunger need to address the root causes of the problem, and provide education and encouragement for the responsible use of resources and of population growth.

If we truly mean to support this cause, we need to accept the part we play and give more than what is necessary to quiet our consciences.