Our World of Plenty
Was a time, not all that long ago, when concerned parents implored their young children to eat the food placed before them, telling them how fortunate they were to have that food. That in other places of the world food was scarce and the choice even scarcer and children in China and Africa go to bed hungry. This scolding enticement likely never was a successful ploy, as children forked unappetizing-tasting vegetables around on their plates hoping to make it look as though by scattering them it would appear a good portion had been eaten.Haven't we come a long way since then, where most families don't sit down to a shared meal that has been thoughtfully and lovingly prepared by a housewife/mother having the time and the inclination to ensure her family eats healthfully. Now easy access to inexpensive pre-prepared meals make meal presentation one whole lot simpler and the products placed before one's family are almost guaranteed to ensure that every last bit is eaten. The nutritional value may be questionable, but the taste-test has been passed with foods whose composition is high in salt, sugar and fat, all taste-bud palatable.
In fact the problem of children unwilling to eat what has been placed before them has been solved in a way that has turned out to be inimical to their health with the introduction of fast food availability and the downturn in home-fashioned meals. Children are presenting with Type-2 diabetes whose onset was once restricted to overweight, sedentary adults. Medical internists and endocrinologists are now seeing children with fat deposits on their internal organs, a truly alarming signal that something is really wrong with our diets.
Because their parents don't practise the discipline of portion control, the children don't either since it's a concept completely foreign to them. As the parents gradually gain more weight than their frames can healthfully accommodate, so do the children emulating their parents in all ways, including dietary and activity-less behaviours. And since everyone does this, since fast-food outlets are everywhere, and the availability of sugared fizzy drinks and fat-and-sugar-laden treats are even available in school environments this has become the norm.
All right, it's true that children in China - an emerging economic giant - no longer face starvation. But the same cannot be said for other countries of the world, even a country like India whose economy, like China's is booming but where millions of children are said to suffer from malnutrition. Children throughout Africa - most particularly the poorest countries in Africa - suffer stark deprivation, to the point where officials with the World Food Program inform us one child dies every five seconds, of hunger and disease.
While countries in the Western Hemisphere bemoan a burgeoning epidemic of obesity and all the health problems that result from that condition, hunger and malnutrition remain the largest threats to health worldwide. Hunger claims more lives than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. There was a time when the much-vaunted Green Revolution was supposed to represent a solution to this deplorable world problem, yet hunger remains the world's single most lethal killer of children.
Tribal warfare, changing climates resulting in drought and uncontrollable insect infestation, corrupt governments and a generally uncaring world attitude are all attributable to the situation whereby 850 million people worldwide suffer chronic hunger. It's a dreadful, lethal disease, curable by the simple expedient of the provision of sufficient energy through the consumption of food. Food which is simply in short supply or not available in marginally producing countries of the world, for those portions of their populations on the lowest rung of human social existence.
James Morris, recently retired after five years as executive director of the World Food Program, has written about the comparison between neighbours, where the children of plenty develop into robust individuals, while the children of want languish in a slow decline toward death. Divided Korea was the example used, where a Korean boy from the North and one from the South presented at age 7 as stark opposites. The boy from the South was 8 inches taller and 20 pounds heavier than his North Korean counterpart.
The world of plenty that we inhabit and which we permit to debilitate us because we seem incapable of disciplining ourselves to take what we need, not what we desire, stands out in stark contrast to the world of want where people face the spectre of death as a result of inadequate food provision. It's certainly true that countries in the developed world whose economic plenty permits them to be generous to their underdeveloped counterparts have a conscience and have attempted to provide support.
It would be wonderful if through the support to third-world countries the leg-up necessary to have them join the world of plenty could become reality. Each country whose economy and society lags drearily behind those grasping opportunities for their future must struggle with the corruption endemic to most of these societies.
We can encourage and point the way; they must be determined and find their own way.
Labels: World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Friday, April 13, 2007
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