Food Fight (or, Let The Hunger Games Begin)

“The world’s principal food concern is not surfeit. It remains dearth. It may not be the concern of Americans, who now spend only 10 percent of their income on food and waste about 40 percent of the food they buy. It is, however, very much the concern of Asians and Africans, many of whom must spend 50 to 75 percent of their income on food.” Sanford Rose

Dolors & Sense

by Sanford Rose

KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—6/4/2012—It is sometimes forgotten that food, or its absence, has dictated the course of history.

Certainly the course of history in the last century.

Food determined the winners of World War I and, in so doing, laid the groundwork for the peculiarly savage nature of World War II.

The Allied armies did not defeat the German Empire in 1918. But the British blockade and the shortage of German agricultural labor did.

Facing want and extreme hunger at home, the Germans surrendered.

Even then, the Allies did not lift the food blockage. They reckoned that continuing hunger would force the Germans to agree to the onerous terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

In the years following the war, remembrance of that hunger made it easy for the Nazis to win popular acceptance of the need for Lebensraum—German living space.

The cockeyed idea was that German self-sufficiency could be assured only by displacing and killing the Slavs, and especially the Ukrainians (deemed useless eaters), and turning their lands into farms run by Germans to feed Germany.

Thus, deep-rooted food insecurity helped determine that World War II would become a racial or genocidal conflict, the like of which had never been seen before.

American food won WWII and supplied the needs of much of the world immediately thereafter.

But American food soon led to another type of food crisis, which has since reached epidemic proportions.

The crisis was foreshadowed by the contents of the typical WWII American soldier’s non-combat dinner tray. It was heaped with steak, ice cream, and coffee with plenty of whole milk and sugar.

A taste sensation for Europeans and others who had never experienced it, but hardly a sustainable diet.

America exported overeating and incorrect eating. It laid the foundations for the global spread of metabolic syndrome—a disease, the symptoms of which are diabetes, hypertension and atherosclerosis, which is directly caused by excess consumption of foods rich in saturated fats.

Yet the world’s principal food concern is not surfeit. It remains dearth.

It may not be the concern of Americans, who now spend only 10 percent of their income on food and waste about 40 percent of the food they buy.

It is, however, very much the concern of Asians and Africans, many of whom must spend 50 to 75 percent of their income on food.

Food shortages and concomitantly rising prices retain the power to topple governments and foment revolutions, as we saw in the events of the Arab Spring.

Climate change will exacerbate these shortages and the resulting distributional bottlenecks. Although some geographic areas will see richer harvests, others will suffer more than offsetting losses.

On balance, heat kills. And what kills crops also kills people.