My friend Christina told me about the One Dollar Diet Project. No, it is not really a diet program. It is a couple (Christopher Greenslate and Kerri Leonard) who decided to spend one month eating on one dollar a day each. About 15% of the world’s population, or 1 billion people, subsists on this amount.

I took a quick glance at the website and quickly became engrossed. I had thought I would find it a bit nutty, a little down-with-the-IMF-protest-y. But it was reasonable. And compelling.

Of course, most popular media didn’t quite know what to make of it when they were doing this. (The couple did their experiment in September.) Inside Edition, for instance, asked: “Is it healthy?” in part because one person lost 14 pounds during the effort.

That, of course, is not the point. People should not have to live on $1 per day — that’s the point.

But, faced with the knowledge of global poverty, what do we do about it? I do work with a foundation that started life as a straightforward research foundation. You know, test tubes and such. Early in the foundation’s existence, they set about to try to eradicate hunger in the world by looking at better ways to grow food. They eventually realized that creating food is actually not the main problem. Getting the food where people are hungry is th issue. Hunger, in other words, is a political problem. Now this foundation studies how democracy can be made to work better.

Some may ask what one couple eating on a dollar a day can do, and ask if it is perhaps a little condescending. But I would say that shedding light on problems like this is the only real way, long term, to remove them. Short term, direct aid is important and needed. But long term change is what is also needed, and this effort can be a catalyst for something like that.