Day 96 – Is Food A Global Security issue?

“When you understand interconnectedness, it makes you more afraid of hating than of dying.”

~ Robert Thurman

180.4 lbs

In doing this project I’ve come to realize just how food is connected to so much of what we do, how we do it, and who we do it with.

In the affluent United States, where 2/3rds of the adult population are overweight or obese, and 1/3 of children are already there themselves, millions of children grow up in “food insecure” households – meaning they count on that free hot meal at school, as the lunch might be the only thing they get to eat that day. Even mild undernourishment in childhood can seriously bring down their ability to concentrate and study. Their grades start to slide, the schools need to keep the grade averages up to keep getting funding, so they lower standards. And now European schoolkids breeze through US tests wondering why they’re so easy, while US kids struggle to pass those same tests.

Regular readers will remember me lamenting how my social life took a nosedive once I started starving myself, since friends often wanted to go out for dinner or drinks. Not only was the prospect of being around big platters of food I can’t have, while being sober around people getting tipsy on alcohol I can’t drink, less than appealing but on the occasion I tried to tough it out there was always one “funny” person waving his or her burger in my face.

Starving also makes you cranky. being in that situation and already having a short fuse doesn’t make for a fun evening.

Now consider that 1/5th of the human population worldwide goes to bed hungry.  What do they see on our airwaves? another 1/5th of the population complaining about obesity. That can’t be good for international relations. Even affluent countries that haven’t adopted our Western diet scratch their heads and wonder what’s wrong with us.

Saudi Arabia is a very affluent nation, thanks to our recent love affair with driving SUVs, with a single occupant, on well paved freeways to and from work. The average Saudi can easily afford food. But how many obese Saudi do you see?

And yet when one tall, angry Saudi decided that the West was decadent (all right – that wasn’t just because we’re fat… but such a visible display didn’t help), he convinced 19 other Saudi to follow him to impoverished Afghanistan where they trained, mixed twisted pseudo-religious justifications with Afghani anger against the West, and attacked the US on that infamous September day.

Imagine if the US had helped Afghanistan rebuild once they Mujahideen repelled the Soviets, as they’d promised. Then when the Taliban tried to come in from Pakistan, the average former Mujahid would have been too busy growing food and taking part in a thriving economy to listen to their twisted brand of fundamentalism.  By the time Bin Ladin and his 19 dwarfs turned up, they would have been received with blank stares rather than open arms.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch.

But c’mon; 1 billion people overfed and 1 billion people starving. There’s something wrong with that. And when someone tries to blow something up in a country that’s largely overfed, the bomber is often (though not always, I concede) from or trained in a country that’s largely starving.

We already know that obesity is bad for the environment. Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine published a study called Population adiposity and climate change in the International Journal of Epidemiology. Reuters summed it up as “Each fat person is responsible for about one tonne of carbon dioxide emissions a year more on average than each thin person, adding up to an extra one billion tonnes of CO2 a year in a population of one billion overweight people.”

In simple terms, the study found that because obese people eat more, the extra food production causes causing more carbon emissions. Because they weight more, it takes more fuel to drive them around and they often choose bigger vehicles to be more comfortable. When both the vehicle and people inside it weight more, it takes more gas to go the same distance. Every 200 lbs takes an extra 1mpg, roughly.

So we end up sending money to those who would use it to hurt us by driving oversized vehicles to buy oversized meals that end up making us oversized. Our neighbours, our friends, and some of our loved ones put on a uniform and end up bleeding on foreign sand so… we can drive a 2 ton truck to pick up junk food? That’s seriously messed up.

Imagine if we said no to big box stores out in the middle of nowhere, and shopped at nearby corner grocery stores. You save on fuel and other vehicle costs (or bus pass costs, and the taxes that subsidize transit) and have more left to spend when you reach the store. You can now buy food to feed your kids with and/or better food for yourself. instead of KD and McDonald’s drive through that day, you have food made from fresh ingredients.

With that little shift in exercise and diet, you’re more energetic so when little Billy and Susie come home from school with a better report card thanks to their increased ability to concentrate, you go to the park as a family and have a celebration picnic.

There are those working hard at reclaiming the suburbs and increasing urban density, bringing back things like corner grocery stores, but you can start taking action now. Walk or bike to the store where possible. You’d be amazed how much bike saddlebags can hold. It’s a PITA in snowy winter, but in summer it not only gets you exercise but sun as well.

Give to reputable charities like your city’s food bank, or the FEEDbag project which sells canvas bags for you to carry your groceries home in, and uses the money to fund school lunch programs. Smarter, well-fed kids mean fewer angry, ignorant adults down the road, which makes it harder for some power-tripping jerks to find people to exploit and talk into blowing themselves up “for a cause”.

I’m starting to sound hippyish here, I know. “Food not bombs!”Gah.

Think of this, though: sure, it’s “freedom” when a person can eat so much that  it costs $125 billion in the US alone to treat obesity related diseases. If that same person ate better and walked, not drove, to the store now and then, s/he’d be in better shape. Less obesity means less expenses to treat obesity, which leads to lower health care costs. For Americans that means lower insurance premiums. Plus the fuel savings. Cha-ching! Mo’ money in their own pockets.

And less money in the pockets of those who would use it to do you harm.