Are You Hungry?

A story about finding your calling—and what it means to be truly nourished

A Sufi teaching says: Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates. At the first gate, ask, "Is it true?" At the second, "Is it necessary?" At the third, "Is it kind?"

But perhaps there's a fourth gate. One we rarely visit.

Is it mine to do?

The Meeting Room

Mark Moore was sitting in a Senate meeting room when he first heard about it. Representatives from UNICEF had come with a video—Anderson Cooper reporting on something called Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food.

The concept was almost absurdly simple.

A packet of fortified peanut butter. A child with severe acute malnutrition eats it three times a day for six weeks. In over ninety percent of cases, they recover completely—and never need treatment again.

Doctors Without Borders called it "a revolution in nutritional affairs."

Mark sat there and thought what most of us think: Somebody should do something about this.

Then he walked through the fourth gate.

That somebody became him.

He raised $13 million—an almost laughable leap for a former missionary who'd once struggled to fundraise $30,000 for a used Toyota that fell apart anyway. He built a factory in Fitzgerald, Georgia, in peanut country. Today, Mana Nutrition produces millions of packets of therapeutic food for UNICEF and USAID.

They don't call themselves a nonprofit. Mark calls it "a for-meaning organization."

Meaning is the scoreboard.

The Boy in the Snow

But the story doesn't start in a Senate meeting room.

It starts with an eighth-grader in gym shorts, running through knee-deep snow in Flint, Michigan. Tears freezing on his face.

The older boys had stuffed him in a locker—a chubby, geeky kid who loved basketball. Easy target. They locked the door and walked away. When he finally got out, he didn't stop for his coat. He just ran. Out the school door, into the Michigan winter, all the way home.

That could have been the beginning of a different story.

But there was a young man at his church. Brian Stagner. Just five years older. The new youth pastor at a little congregation no one had heard of.

Brian saw something in Mark worth nourishing.

Got him to church camp. Got him thinking about college—the first in his family to go.

Years later, that little church would close its doors. Disappear from the map. But the kids who passed through Brian's hands are scattered across the world now, doing what Mark calls "crazy things."

The seeds we plant don't always bloom in our gardens.

Mark would spend nearly a decade as a missionary in Uganda, trying to learn a language with no textbooks. Two years in, he was still terrible—breaking down in tears after failed attempts to speak.

"I'd failed so often," he says now, "that I knew today wasn't going to be worse than what I'd already lived through."

It didn't kill him. And so he grew.

Three Dimensions

Martin Luther King Jr. is one of Mark's touchstones.

King once preached a sermon called "The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life." He spoke of length—developing your inner powers, becoming fully yourself. He spoke of width—the outward reach to others, the recognition that you're not alone. And he spoke of height—the upward reach, the connection to something greater, the source of meaning.

King said: Unless you have all three, you'll be flat. A two-dimensional person. You might be impressive, but you'll never make a difference.

Mark thinks about this when he talks about vulnerability.

"If you want to meet the vulnerable," he says, "just look around you. Every human being is vulnerable. We all need someone to love us. We all need something to do. We all need something to hope for."

The vulnerable have had enough of binary thinking, Mark believes. Enough of right and wrong, black and white, us and them. What they haven't had enough of is someone who sees them in three dimensions.

The Edge

A child dies from malnutrition every eight seconds—more than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. Mark describes it as a jumbo jet crashing every hour, with no one looking for the wreckage.

Yet what strikes you about him isn't the statistics. It's the reframe.

"Our main mantra at Mana is: You're about to hear a good news story about malnutrition. Who thought that was possible?"

He explains it like this: Take your phone. Slide it to the very edge of your desk. If anything bumps that table, your screen cracks.

Kids born in South Sudan are born on that edge. A nutritional cliff. Corruption, drought, bad roads—fifty reasons they could fall.

"We can't spend our lives building nets around the edge," Mark says. "We have to move those kids back to the center."

Sacred Ground

Mark has traced a thread through wisdom traditions—stories of feeding, of breaking bread together. Every culture has them. The shared meal as sacred ground.

"I think the biggest problem in our culture," he says, "is that people are so malnourished—spiritually, relationally—that they've ceased to be hungry. And once you cease to be hungry, you're dying."

This is true of children wasting away. It's also true of marriages, careers, souls. The ones still hungry—even struggling—are still alive. They can still be fed.

Americans spent $370 million last year on Halloween costumes for their pets. The global budget for therapeutic food that saves children's lives? About $170 million.

"We're not even halfway to pet costumes," Mark says. Then admits: "My family has one too."

Give It Away

Mana runs a program called Calorie Cloud. People track exercise through their phones; calories burned become packets of therapeutic food.

Don't lose weight—give it away.

The metaphor works in both directions. We live in what Mark calls "a stuffed and starved world"—one side dying from too many calories, the other from too few.

Seeds We Plant

Mark is careful not to paint his journey as triumph.

"Saving starving kids sounds dramatic. But it was frustrating. Difficult. There were days we felt like we were flopping."

And he keeps thinking about Brian Stagner's little church. The one that doesn't exist anymore. The one whose work lives on in people it will never see.

"Don't let the drama of someone else's story discourage you from what you're doing," he says. "If it's one kid today at lunch, that's huge."

The Invitation

King also said this: "Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'"

Mark has spent years reframing that question. Not Are you lost? but Are you hungry?

Everyone's hungry for something.

And maybe the answer isn't a sermon or a program or a policy.

Maybe it's a table. A meal. A willingness to ask.

Somewhere, right now, someone is having the greatest day of their life.

Somewhere, a young person is being seen by someone who believes in them.

Somewhere, someone is walking through the fourth gate—asking not just Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind? But is it mine to do?

The table is set.

The invitation stands.