Just five seconds

Every five seconds, someone in the world die because of starvation. Every five seconds, a new image with the hashtag “foodporn” is published on Instagram. It is as if the reckless spending and malnutrition proceeded at the same rate, for an incredible and sad coincidence. Who has not come across or has created a photo and then post it on Instagram with hashtag foodporn? In the jargon of the internet, this keyword has come to identify images of overabundant and excessive portions.
They can be identified with 5 seconds of happiness for someone, but not for all: in those same five seconds a person dies from lack of food. They die every day of hunger and more than 26,000 people die in a year, more than 3 million children under age 5. Hunger is on the first place in the list of factors of greatest risk for health in the world and each year hunger kills more people than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.
www.justfiveseconds.com mixes two streams of information: the hashtag “foodporn” recalled from instagram and the Reuters news on world hunger. The choice of their more or less visibility on the site is a reflection of our focus on one or the other topic. The website refresh every 5 seconds, which is the rate of death from malnutrition, and the foodporn images are updated automatically.