This one is so good, I can't add a thing
As a blogger, you always try to add something of your own to stories you get from the paper, magazines or from journals. But the editorial by William Saletan that first appeard in the Washington Post is so good, I feel compelled to pass it on to you unchanged. The article is wonderfully written, with some parts laugh out loud funny, but the overall message is very sobering.
I'll get you started and then you can click on the link to finish reading. (Do read all the way to the end, some of his funniest lines are there.)
Please Don't Feed the People
By William Saletan
WASHINGTON POST, Sunday, September 3, 2006
In 1894, Congress established a national Labor Day to honor those who "from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold." In the century since, the grandeur of human achievement has multiplied. Over the past four decades, global population has doubled, but food output, driven by increases in productivity, has outpaced it. Poverty, infant mortality and hunger are receding. For the first time in our planet's history, a species no longer lives at the mercy of scarcity. We have learned to feed ourselves.
We've learned so well, in fact, that we're getting fat. Not just the United States or Europe, but the whole world. Egyptian, Mexican and South African women are now as fat as Americans. Far more Filipino adults are now overweight than underweight. In China, one in five adults is too heavy, and the rate of overweight children is 28 times higher than it was two decades ago. In Kuwait, Thailand and Tunisia, obesity, diabetes and heart disease are soaring.
Hunger is far from conquered. But since 1990, the global rate of malnutrition has declined an average of 1.7 percent a year. Based on data from the World Health Organization and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, for every two people who are malnourished, three are now overweight or obese. Among women, even in most African countries, overweight has surpassed underweight . The balance of peril is shifting.
Fat is no longer a rich man's disease. For middle- and high-income Americans, the obesity rate is 29 percent. For low-income Americans, it's 35 percent . Fourteen percent of middle- and high-income kids age 15 to 17 are overweight. For low-income kids in the same age bracket, it's 23 percent . Globally, weight has tended to rise with income. But a recent study in Vancouver, Canada, found that preschoolers in "food-insecure" households were twice as likely as other kids to be overweight or obese. In Brazilian cities, the poor have become fatter than the rich .
Technologically, this is a triumph. In the early days of our species, even the rich starved. Barry Popkin, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, divides history into several epochs. In the hunter-gatherer era, if we didn't find food, we died. In the agricultural era, if our crops perished, we died. In the industrial era, famine receded, but infectious diseases killed us. Now we've achieved such control over nature that we're dying not of starvation or infection, but of abundance. Nature isn't killing us. We're killing ourselves.
You don't have to go hungry anymore; we can fill you with fats and carbs more cheaply than ever. You don't have to chase your food; we can bring it to you. You don't have to cook it; we can deliver it ready to eat. You don't have to eat it before it spoils; we can pump it full of preservatives so it lasts forever. You don't even have to stop when you're full. We've got so much food to sell, we want you to keep eating.
Click here to finish reading the article.