The last time I ate a bowl of rice with 100 grains in it was never. Apparently, the folks at www.Freerice.com enjoy eating their portions of rice in one forkful.

Freerice.com, launched on October 7,   is a vocab-building website with a twist: for each multiple-choice vocabulary question answered correctly, the website donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. Every time your cute animated bowl of rice is filled up to 100 grains, you find yourself with a fresh new bowl when you continue to play. The funds for the rice originate from ads on the website for well-known companies like Office Depot, Legos and 1-800-PetMeds.

Since its creation, the website has donated more than 5.5 billion grains of rice to hunger victims worldwide. This number seems like an astounding amount until you do the math.

According to the Rice Association of the U.K., there are more than 29,000 grains of rice in one pound. This means that since December 1, Freerice.com has donated more than 95 tons of rice. So far, so good.

But consider the fact that this past August, one ton of rice from Vietnam was worth roughly $306. This means that Freerice.com has raised a little more than $29,000 worth of rice, which is basically equivalent to the cost of a new Jeep Grand Cherokee.

So between concerned students and stay-at-home-do-gooder moms, Freerice.com has dished out enough rice to pay for a fresh new set of wheels.

You can sit in your heated home, pointing and clicking your mouse, filling miniature bowls of rice for the 854 million faceless victims of hunger. And when you're filling these 100-grain virtual "bowls of rice" every minute or so, you can pat yourself on the back and smile inside for being such a kindhearted, generous person.

I don't mean to make any kind of mockery out of starvation. It's a serious humanitarian cause that needs to be addressed. But Freerice.com is an ineffective way of helping the cause. It's the easy way out.

Freerice.com does nothing to help sustain hunger victims. It gives them temporary supplies of food and makes them reliant on foreign sources of aid. If hunger is ever to be completely eradicated, hunger victims will ultimately need to become mostly self-sufficient. Their countries must be able to produce or obtain their own food, and victims must have the proper means to provide for themselves and their families.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the vocabulary practice is good enough to boost your SAT scores and make each visit to the website worthwhile. Maybe it's even distracting enough so you can put off your homework for another hour. If that's the case, then good. Keep on serving up your mini-bowls of rice to kids in need.

But if you think you are saving the world by donating hundreds of grains of rice daily, you might need to think again.