Fighting Over Food
The Week, February 25, 2011

Soaring food prices are spreading hunger and helping to spark revolutions in the Mideast. Why is food so scarce?

Food prices are now at an all-time high, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Wheat cost twice as much in January as it did last June, pushing an additional 44 million people worldwide into poverty. Higher prices of staples, particularly wheat, helped drive the public anger in Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, where the average family spends 38 percent of its income on food (compared with 7 percent in the U.S.). “Some days we do not eat dinner,” said Cairo truck driver Ahmed Said, who went on strike for higher wages after President Hosni Mubarak’s government fell. “If our child goes to the hospital and we have to pay for that, then my wife and I do not have a meal. How can Mubarak be worth so much and we have so little?” 

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Quality, not quantity 
The Economist, March 24, 2011

Why small doses of vitamins could make a huge difference to the world’s health.

At the depths of the Great Depression, George Orwell wrote of the English working classes: “The basis of their diet is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potato—an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread?…Yes it would, but the point is, no human being would ever do such a thing.…A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man does not…When you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want to eat something a little bit tasty.”

Orwell was describing something that has become one of the world’s neglected scourges: the bad diet of the poor. When people think of malnutrition, they usually picture its most acute form—listless infants with bloated bellies, the little victims of famine. But there is a chronic manifestation of hunger, too, milder but more widespread. It affects those with enough calories to eat but too few micronutrients (vitamins, minerals and so on). They suffer the diseases of poor nutrition.

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