Opinion Sur
It is necessary to rethink the current diet in its entirety and act now. Because given the systemic advantages of malnutrition, short stature, obesity and micro and macronutrient deficiencies, and given that, despite individual suffering, they are functional to the development of social life, then we must expect this to be the new form of hunger in the new millennium.
The colonial expansion of the European powers will find in Africa, America, and Asia not only the gold that financed their development, but also the possibility of growing the most expensive food in their price pyramid: sugar, which will go from sweetening the meals of royalty to sustaining the diet of the poor. The Caribbean plantation system inaugurates the large-scale trade in African slaves (kidnapped to remedy the genocide of the natives). Both in America and in Southeast Asia, sugar plantations (with their sugar mills to crystallize it) expanded at the expense of forests and cultures. From the XVII century onwards, cheap sugar flooded kitchens around the world and metabolically financed the Industrial Revolution and—by distilling molasses to produce brandy—became a weapon of territorial domination as much as a proletarian hunger killer[1]
If mercantile capitalism spread the sugar trade around the world, industrial capitalism used it thoroughly. The factories are built on the spatial planning of the sugar mills. The energy of the metropolitan workers was assured with cheap infusions from overseas. The energy – through the sugar – and the feeling of satiety and warmth – through the hot water – gave the workers what they needed to endure long hours of poorly paid work. Since the aristocracy appropriated most of the food production, the workers gladly accepted cheap sugar. It should not be forgotten that the sweet taste, precisely because it was scarce when the anatomy of the species was formed, is not going to be rejected, as European abolitionists proved when they called – with little success – to boycott the consumption of sugar to stop the infamous slave trade.
Even today, after half a century of health pressure to reduce sugar in diets, given the magnitude and harmful consequences of its consumption, the goal is barely achieved by substitution with sweeteners. Virtually all industrialized foods contain sugars (with sucrose and high fructose syrup among the most common) because it increases both palatability and shelf life, and it is also present in an “invisible” form in salty foods that are not expected to contain it.
The transport of species that followed European colonial expansion reshaped ecosystems by promoting 15 genera on a planetary scale, destroying the landscape and local organization for the sake of commercial performance. The food industry that emerged from this abundance transformed food through preservation, mechanization, transportation, safety controlled by expert systems, advertising, and marketing based on wholesale-retail networks on a planetary scale. Today, more than industries, there are 250 highly diversified holdings (agricultural companies, seed laboratories, banks, transport companies, ports, supermarkets, etc.) on a global scale that decide the diet of the diner in today’s societies[2]. And as the scale lowers the price, it is mass-produced and sold globally, so that they buy the same industrialized products from Argentina, China, France or Nigeria to eat. Long marketing chains take packaging to all corners of the planet and turn the diner into a consumer. They are goods “good to sell rather than good to eat”[3] because despite the diversity of brands, they all contain the same thing. The success of an industrialized food lies in the fact that it is produced at a low cost so that, although the buyer is unaware of it, there are things inside the packaging that will not be missing because they lower costs: carbohydrates, fats, salt and sugar, along with preservatives, flavorings and colorings[4], among the substances allowed, and plastic waste, drugs, and pesticides among those not allowed. The norm of our time is to eat unknown products in solitude, in individual containers and, above all, to eat non-stop (24 hours a day, seven days a week) anywhere and at all times.
Processed foods replaced natural products by reducing the time spent cooking (in a society that gradually delegitimized reproductive tasks), ultra-processed foods replace whole meals (such as the “cereal bar” that replaces lunch at the office). This beneficial situation for the industry was very expensive for consumers, because this type of diet together with the reduction of movement are considered responsible for chronic non-communicable diseases (diabetes, hypertension, cholesterolemia, stroke, etc.) that afflict the world today to the point of becoming pandemics: obesity is the first non-infectious pandemic declared as such by the World Health Organization (WHO)[5].
In a previous article, we have addressed the food crisis[6], which today is presented as structural (it simultaneously affects production, distribution, and consumption), paradoxical (there is food for all, there are 800 million malnourished[7]) and terminal (pollution has probably exceeded the self-purifying capacities of all ecosystems).
In production, we are enduring a crisis of quality (excess of carbohydrates, fats, and sugars with a critical situation in micronutrients such as vitamins, iron, and calcium) and sustainability (if the extractivist model of chemical agriculture, pharmacological livestock, and predatory fishing continues, the deterioration of the environment compromises future production). As distribution is carried out through market mechanisms, there is a crisis of equity, because food does not go where it is needed but where it can be afforded, with disastrous consequences for the population, such as underconsumption and overconsumption, both of which are unhealthy. And with respect to consumption, we are enduring a crisis of commensality, since industrial food has replaced all local patterns by boycotting food identities (which are part of identity) and erasing homemade food and the table in a permanent snack of “ocnis”: unidentified edible objects[8].
The extraordinary growth in food availability in the XXI century did not guarantee an end to hunger and food-borne diseases. With an apparent availability of 3,200 kcal/person/day as a global average (which implies a production capable of feeding 10,000 million people), the 8,000 million people who inhabit the planet today should have access to the 2,000 kcal/person/day recommended by nutritionists. It is hidden that 30% of the food produced is lost in transport and industrialization, wasted (due to mismanagement) or thrown away (to maintain prices). And it is hidden that as the food system globalized to become, as it is today, a world-system, with productive enclaves and market niches, hunger no longer depends on natural causes (droughts, floods), but economic (access to food), and among those who can buy, the class bodies of the past were inverted: Now the poor are more likely to be fat while the rich can stay skinny, both with specific diseases associated with those bodies.
Today, it is easier to find overweight and obesity in poverty than in wealth. Because the world’s poor buy (or receive) high-yielding food (processed by global industry) full of energy (cheap) and lacking in micronutrients (expensive). This malnutrition has also been called hidden hunger: because it covers up with abundance (of bread, potatoes, fat and sugar) all the evils of scarcity (of meat, dairy, fruits and vegetables). The sad thing is that the victims themselves do not question the social nature of their sentence, because centuries of associating opulent bodies with well-being mean that being overweight does not work as a health alert; at most it is seen as an aesthetic nuisance.
This malnutrition induced by industry (because it is the hegemonic supply in the cities) can be seen as functional to the development of social, economic, and political life. With this configuration of consumption, everyone seems to derive some benefit: the population, the market, and the State, only that in this kind of perverse game human beings are condemned to lose in advance for the mere fact of playing it.
For the poor it is profit because, contrary to what happened in the past, they now eat. Badly, but they eat. They can develop their lives, learn, work, reproduce, participate in social activities, etc. It is an unhealthy but inclusive organization of consumption. Micronutrient deficiencies, immunosuppression, or infection are visible in the long term and as an individual condition (greater sensitivity to infections, lower level of learning, low birth weight, anemia, etc.). The medical system has clinical (individual) answers. It attends, controls, legitimizes, regulates and medicates, which results in the expansion of its functions (from treating disease to controlling health). The pharmaceutical industry is expanding with the medicalization of (fortified) foods. Malnutrition is also functional for the agri-food system, since even the limited consumption of the poor allows the creation of a market that produces profits (and certainly more profits than the absence of consumption by a hungry population or consumption in an alternative, informal system of self-production and self-consumption).
When household consumption drops to critical levels, the State supplements with the same processed foods of its unhealthy consumption. Whether it is for economics (cheap), for logistics (dry, easy-to-transport packaging), or for acceptance (they are the same noodles, oils, and sugar they eat when they can buy), for the market they even simplify demand. They are also functional to the political component, which generates party clientele through plans that reduce social conflict.
They are functional to economic organization because the malnourished work, produce even with low productivity, in formal and informal urban labor markets. Functional to the conceptions that the different sectors have about themselves and about others, because they mark, delimit, relate, oppose and complement visions of life, society, and the body, partly marking, partly masking the relationships between them.
If our analysis has been accurate, it is necessary to rethink the current diet in its entirety and act now. Because given the systemic advantages of malnutrition, short stature, obesity and micro and macronutrient deficiencies, and given that, despite individual suffering, they are functional to the development of social life, then we must expect this to be the new form of hunger in the new millennium.
Selected paragraphs from the article published in Nueva Sociedad 311 / May – June 2024
[1] Sidney Mintz: Sweetness and power. The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Siglo XXI Editores, Madrid, 1996.
[2] Raj Patel: Obesos y famélicos. Globalización, hambre y negocios en el nuevo sistema alimentario mundial (Obese and famished, hunger and businesses in the new world food system), Marea, Buenos Aires, 2008.
[3] M. Harris: ob. cit.
[4] Marion Nestle: Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003.
[5] Margaret Chan: “Director-General’s address by Dr Margaret Chan to the 66th World Health Assembly”, 20/5/2013, available at www.who.int/dg/speeches/2013/world_health_assembly_20130520/es
[6] P. Aguirre: «Alternatives to the global food crisis» in Nueva Sociedad No 202, 3-4/2016, available at www.nuso.org
[7] FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO: “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World. Fostering Climate Resilience for Food Security and Nutrition”, Rome, 2018.
[8] Claude Fischler: The (h)omnivore. The Body, Cuisine and Taste, Anagrama, Barcelona, 1995.
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