It’s easy to take food and drink for granted. If I think back to the bank holiday weekend, I enjoyed ribs at a pop-up food market on Saturday, an M&S “Dine in for two” meal on Monday and a variety of fruit, vegetables and olives from all around the world throughout the weekend, mostly washed down with a glass of water from the tap in my flat. As supermarkets, takeaways and restaurants start delivering online purchases within an hour (just by ordering on their website or an app), it becomes easier and easier to take these gastronomical luxuries for granted.

Returning back to work today, I learnt that The One Foundation has funded an emergency response project in East Africa, which is in the grip of a devastating food crisis. Something I was not aware of as the newspapers are preoccupied with stories about the upcoming election, Donald Trump and “shocking” selfies from the Kardashian sisters and so on…

This morning I learnt that more than 19 million people are facing terrifying food shortages in East Africa. Millions of families that face starvation because of droughts in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia are in desperate need of a safe water supply. Famine has been declared in the worst affected areas for the first time in the world since 2011. Millions of people are struggling to survive because they don’t have food or clean water, a basic human right that we take for granted every single day.

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But thanks to our supporters like you, we’ve been able to fund an emergency response project to help those most in need as soon as possible. Thanks to you, trucks will transport clean water to the worst affected regions. Thanks to you, families will receive emergency food supplies. Thanks to you, water points will be rehabilitated to provide thousands of people with clean water. Thanks to you making a decision to pick up a One Drink or donating to The One Foundation, thousands of lives will be saved.

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I’m not saying that this experience will (or should) drastically change my eating habits – I still love pop-up restaurants, meal deals and exotic fruit and these are some of the many luxuries we’re lucky to have an abundance of in the UK – but why not make a decision to buy local, fair-trade, free range or food and drink products that help to make the world a better place for people less fortunate than us?

Just as chaos theory suggests that the tiny flutter of a butterfly’s wing can trigger a cyclone on the other side of the world, making a small difference to your every day shopping habits could have a huge impact to someone else’s world.

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Photo credit: Oxfam / Tina Hillier & Bruno Bierren