The wealthy are still more nutritionally satiated than the majority
There are many things that haven’t changed much in society’s evolution. The disparity in nutritional satiation between the world’s wealthiest and everyone else is a clear example of that. With the COVID-19 epidemic in full swing at the moment, it begs the question, why do we still continue to utilize many of the outdated food practices that we do today when they put us at greater risk for health crises like this disease?
I’ve seen many articles and opinion pieces circulate that seems to suggest that had the whole world been vegan, we wouldn’t be experiencing the current pandemic. While this framing surely helps the vegan camp (and yes, I’m a part of it), it neglects many other issues with our food system. As most of us know, economics has more to do with our global issues than anything else; everything is about money.
The United States is still very much in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. While the U.S. is not the sun (everything does NOT revolve around the country), as a native citizen, I feel more apt to talk about the U.S. than any other nation. Being that this is the case, I have to bring attention to the fact that we have a large number of people in the U.S. who have a pre-existing condition that will make people more likely to suffer from the disease, and that pre-existing condition is obesity. Obviously, obesity encompasses a lot of things, but most people who are obese tend to have diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, or possibly some combination of them all.
The question is: how did we get here?
If you live on the coasts or in a major city within the U.S., you’re less likely to see large concentrations of obese people. The reason for that being that those areas tend to be much wealthier than other parts of the nation, where people are much more health-conscious, and lead more active lifestyles. In wealthier areas, food quality is much better, and there is greater access to locally sourced foods that are nutritious. In poorer areas, people have access to foods, but they tend to be lacking in nutritional value but make people feel full because they are heavy in carbs and fats; there’s a reason why we are a fast food nation. In contrasting this to what Anthony Wohl describes in his 1983 book Endangered Lives, it’s easy to see how little has changed since the late 1800s:
As in the country, so in the town, the staples were bread, potatoes, and tea…. If the rural poor ate birds then the urban poor ate pairings of tripe, slink (prematurely born calves), or broxy (diseased sheep)…. Stocking weavers, shoemakers, needle women and silk weavers ate less than one pound of meat a week and less than eight ounces of fats. Bread formed the mainstay of their diet with a weekly consumption which varied from almost eight pounds a head in the case of the needlewomen to over twelve pounds per adult among the 2,000 or so agricultural labourers in Smith’s survey. Large numbers of workmen were getting their carbohydrates and calories mainly in bread — over two pounds of it daily! Dr. Buchanan, another of John Simon’s team at the Privy Council’s medical department, sadly concluded that there were “multitudes of people…whose daily food consists at every meal of tea and bread, bread and tea”….
While the total calorific intake might have been generally adequate, the Victorian working-class diet was heavy in carbohydrates and fats, low in protein, and deficient in several vitamins, notably C and D. Nearly all the diets investigated reveal a serious lack of fresh green vegetables, a low protein intake, and very little fresh milk…. For approximately one-third of the entire population there would be a ten-year period or so when the children were too young to contribute significantly to the family income, during which the family would be underfed. This must be put within the context of Victorian life-long working hours, often arduous physical labour, and long walks to and from work. Modern nutritional studies show that adults walking a distance to work and engaged in strenuous activity may use 3,700 or more calories a day [compared to an intake of “only 2,099 calories per capita for the working-class family” at this time], and that the body uses up far more calories when recovering from sickness.¹
Today, people aren’t walking everywhere, but instead driving everywhere, and that includes to drive-throughs, which serve up fast & cheap nutrient-deficient foods, that contribute to the United States’ obesity epidemic as well as other westernized/developed nations. At the other end of the spectrum, we have developing nations that don’t even have enough food to support their populations, when the world could if we only made it a point to figure out how to do that.
While going vegan or plant-based is not necessarily the answer, thinking more holistically about our food systems — from how safe and sustainable they are, to whether or not they can adequately feed the globe — is something that we should all be more mindful of. Technologies such as blockchain present the greatest opportunity for transparency within the food system, something that is severely lacking. More on this opportunity in another post, but for now, I hope this has got you thinking more about how the food system has and still is catering to the wealthiest segment of the population, as well as what one of the major downsides of that is.
I pray that the coronavirus doesn’t affect the obese population as much as I think it can, but ultimately, that’s up to God. All we can do is keep ourselves healthy and ponder ways in which we can improve food systems so that they nutritionally satiate everyone and not just those who have the means and education.
“What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?” –Romans 8:31
¹Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 50–52.
