... About 45,905,911,510 Grains of Rice

Reader, one of my earliest entries on this blog was about my addiction to the website FreeRice (read the post here). Well, today is FreeRice's one-year anniversary! Woo-hoo! According to their website, FreeRice patrons have donated 45,905,911,510 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program over the past year.

Let's do a little FreeRice math, shall we?

45,905,911,510 grains of rice = 956,373,156 grams of rice*
956,373,156 grams of rice = 2,108,441 pounds of rice
2,108,411 pounds of rice = 2,390,933 daily rations of rice

That's nearly a quarter billion people fed through the efforts of the FreeRice website. That's pretty impressive. But guess what, Reader? The UN estimates that there are over 850 million people in the world that do not get enough food every day to sustain a healthy life. FreeRice hit its donation peak in December of 2007, just a couple of months after its launch. Don't get me wrong - I LOVE the fact that my late-November blog entry inspired thousands of people to visit the website and therefore donate nearly 7 billion grains of rice in a month. But shortly after that the numbers dropped, and the average monthly donation is about half that.

Here's what I have to say about that, Reader: What gives?! I've made it pretty easy for you. The FreeRice link has just been sittin' pretty on my sidebar for almost a year now. And we both know you visit my blog six or seven times a day. But you can put your dependency problem to good use! Just think, Reader, if one of those times you said to yourself, "I'm going to make a small sacrifice... instead of re-reading '... About Running My Own Country' for the thirty-seventh time, I'll just click over to FreeRice and feed some starving people."

I know what you're thinking, Reader, and you're wrong. It wouldn't offend me in the least if you decided to forgo memorizing my past posts in favor of visiting FreeRice. Well, maybe it'd hurt a little bit. But trust me, the offense is minimal, and somewhere deep down I have a soul, possibly, and that soul knows it's probably worth it. Besides, the improved vocabulary you'll develop from playing FreeRice will probably help in your highly admirable efforts to be more like me.

Now, Reader, I do realize that not all of you get your jollies from taking a never-ending vocabulary quiz like I do (although for the life of me I do not understand WHY that wouldn't bring you endless joy! *sigh*). So good news for you - FreeRice is not just a vocabulary quiz anymore! There are now a whole bunch of new subjects to try, like multiplication, Spanish, the Periodic table, and famous paintings. I'm on a geography kick right now.

My name is Kristen, and I'm still a FreeRice addict.



*According to Dr Google, there are approximately 48 grains of rice per gram. Go ahead, check my math. I dare you. Except it's probably wrong. In which case, I don't want to know.