PARLOUS PLENTY INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

285
CHAPTER
26
PARLOUS PLENTY
INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY
The custom and fashion of today will be the awkwardness and
outrage of tomorrow. So arbitrary are these transient laws.
Alexandre Dumas
LOOKING BACKWARD from this start of a new century (and new millen-
nium for that matter), just a tad more than 600 years have gone by since the
Old and New Worlds were united. These are but a small fraction of the ten
to twelve thousand years that have elapsed since the beginning of agriculture,
but in that short time span the foods of the world have been astonishingly
rearranged so that potatoes grow in such diverse climates as those of Siberia
and Indonesia, sugar in equally diverse places like Pakistan and Mexico, and
pistachios have been transplanted from Iran to California – now the world’s
second largest producer.
In the Old World, China is now the most important producer of wheat,
originally domesticated in the Middle East; China and India dominate the
production of rice, which likely began as a Southeast Asian crop; India
is the biggest producer of tea, fi rst cultivated in China, and peanuts, fi rst
cultivated in South America; tropical Asia produces most of the world’s
manioc – an American plant that Brazil claims as a native; and China is
also the leading producer of white and sweet potatoes, a half-world away
from their native Andes. In the New World, Brazil has become the world’s
286
A Movable Feast
most important producer of coffee, originally from Africa, sugar from
New Guinea, a big producer of pepper from India’s Malabar coast, and
the second largest producer of soybeans, which originated in China. North

America is a major grower of wheat, the biggest producer of Mesoamerican
maize, and leads Brazil in soybean production.
Save for the United States, however, the nations that cultivate the most
important of these (now thoroughly shuffl ed) crops are generally thought
of as situated in the developing world. And while residents of the West, and
especially the people of the United States, are battling obesity, much of the
world lives under the threat of famine – and has for at least the past 6,000
years.
1
China has suffered as many as ninety famines per century over the
last 2,000 years, including a recent one between 1958 and 1961; most esti-
mates of the number of dead were at between 14 and 26 million – although
some said as many as 40 million. In India at least ninety major famines
have occurred over the past 2,500 years. Russia continued to be ravaged by
famine – mostly man-made after the Bolshevik Revolution – that claimed
millions of lives until the mid-twentieth century; and in Brazil’s northeast,
climatic and political circumstances have made famine a regular occur-
rence since these disasters fi rst entered the historical record in 1584.
2
Of course, famines are not just limited to big food producing nations;
during the twentieth century they made catastrophic appearances in devel-
oping countries in the Horn of Africa, sub-Sahara Africa, and Asia.
3
The terrible irony is that the ravages of famine are phenomena that glo-
balization – which has precipitated a tremendous expansion of agricultural
productivity, a sophisticated system of transport, and globally interlinked
markets – could easily prevent.
4
Or it could if the nations of the world
would agree that every one of its citizens is entitled to food security as a

basic human right.
5
Until that agreement is reached, famines and chronic
malnutrition will mar the future as they have the past. And there is some-
thing very wrong when some 800 million people in the world are classi-
fi ed as chronically undernourished yet U.S. farmers collect money for not
growing food, and northern European farmers produce such an excess of
food that the Common Market of the European Union has ordered cut-
backs on the production of such items as pork and butter.
Yet, even more devastating than famine-generated hunger is the chronic
malnutrition that affl icts some 800 million individuals as we begin the
twenty-fi rst century, even though food globalization has helped to narrow
the dietary gap between some of the developed and developing countries.
6
Parlous Plenty into the Twenty-First Century
287
Nonetheless, it seems that the world is losing its war on hunger because
the narrowing excludes almost a billion persons for whom even the cost of
cooking fuel can be a major expense.
7
In the early 1990s, it was estimated
that some 500 million children and adults experienced continuous hunger
(and even more were vulnerable to it); that one in three children in the
developing world was seriously malnourished; and that over a billion peo-
ple suffered from nutritional defi ciencies. Ironically, these estimates were
made at a time when Americans were spending a sum greater than the
entire economy of Medieval Europe on their dogs and cats.
8
In the agrarian societies of developing countries, a sole cereal crop may
supply as much as 80 percent of the total caloric intake, and meat is seldom

if ever tasted – a situation that has not changed for many over the course
of some 10,000 years.
9
Even in Mexico, during a recent recession it was cal-
culated that fully one-half of its estimated 92 million people were getting
less than the minimum daily requirement of 1,300 calories.
10
It is generally acknowledged that adequate infant nutrition is bedrock
for the optimal health of a people; yet in under-nourished populations
malnutrition begins in the womb. Too often the result is a low birth-weight
(LBW) infant, and LBW is the most important determinant of neonatal
and infant mortality as well as physical growth until age seven.
11
Although
there is a high correlation between maternal weight gain during pregnancy
and normal birth weight, many developing country mothers register low, or
even negative, weight gains during pregnancy. And together, low maternal
weight and LBW continue to be among the leading causes of the world’s
disease burden.
12
LBW is not easily corrected after birth, in no small part because of
the diffi culty of educating developing country mothers who comprise the
majority of some 870 million illiterate adults living in those countries.
13
Busy mothers have curtailed breast-feeding since Neolithic women began
working in the fi elds, and substitute infant-feeding methods have left much
to be desired ever since. The use of a pap has led straight to protein energy
malnutrition, often because the mother’s immunological defenses are not
transmitted in her milk to the baby. Wet-nursing has proven equally disas-
trous,

14
and bovine milk is not only hard to digest for human infants but,
because iron availability from milk is species-specifi c, they get less than
half the iron from bovine milk than they would from breast milk.
15
Yet, formula foods – originally developed as low-cost milk substitutes
such as INCAPARINA made from corn and cottonseed fl our or CSM
288
A Movable Feast
(corn-soya-milk),
16
also present deadly problems. Practically everybody
can recall hearing or reading about multinational corporations aggressively
marketing infant formulas to replace mother’s milk in Third World nations.
Those mothers were defl ected from breast-feeding by formulas they could
not afford (and thus they over diluted them) and the mother’s badly needed
antibodies in hostile disease environments did not reach their babies. Per-
haps most lethal of all, unhygienic living conditions meant that formulas
were prepared with fouled water and there was little understanding of the
importance of bottle sterilization. For all of these reasons, countless babies
died amid erupting scandal.
17
Moreover, infancy is just the beginning of the nutritional trials that
face Third World youngsters. Those that survive this one and move into
childhood, are confronted by another set of hurdles. In many societies
men and boys eat fi rst, and females are last in line at the food pot, with
female children just ahead of the family dog.
18
Like infants, children are
also beset with a high frequency of diarrheal and respiratory diseases that

contribute to malnutrition and stem from it because malnutrition lowers
resistance to pathogens.
19
It is a synergistic interaction in which each con-
dition worsens the other, and nutritional defi ciencies – especially those of
protein, vitamin A, and iron – make the child increasingly vulnerable to
diseases like measles (a major killer of the Third World young) and nutri-
tional syndromes like PEM.
20
PEM or protein energy malnutrition consists of a group of nutritional
diseases related to an inadequate intake of protein and energy (calories)
that chiefl y attack infants and young children in poor countries. Its symp-
tomatic poles are kwashiorkor, characterized by edema and skin lesions (a
rich variety of colloquial names indicates a wide prevalence historically)
and marasmus, with the victim presenting a “skin and bones” appearance.
In the past the swollen bellies of kwashiorkor were sometimes interpreted
to signal over-nutrition, but the signs of frank starvation characteristic of
marasmus have never fooled anybody.
21
PEM impairs immunities to infections, produces a fatty and some-
times permanently damaged liver, and, as is the case with severe vitamin
defi ciencies, has been linked with mental decrement in later life.
22
The
illness generally develops when a child is weaned from the protein in
mother’s milk and placed on a pap. It is prevented by the inclusion of
some good quality protein in the weanling’s diet. However, this is some-
times not easy to include in places where population growth exceeds
Parlous Plenty into the Twenty-First Century
289

food production – making yet another argument for global food entitle-
ments as a part of food globalization.
23
On a more upbeat note, the globalization of foodstuffs has helped to
make enough “extra” protein available to increase the average height for
many in the world and to help them start catching up to the stature of our
Paleolithic ancestors.
24
This is because of a close association between the
average height of a population and its nutritional status, so that height can
actually serve as a proxy for protein intake.
25
Protein intake is also important to the age of menarche. In seventeenth-
century Germany, for example, it was noted that peasant girls menstru-
ated later than the daughters of townspeople or the aristocracy.
26
Over the
last century there has been a decline in the age of female sexual maturity
throughout most of the world
27
although, signifi cantly, the greatest height
increases and age of menarche reductions have taken place in the United
States and Europe – those regions of the world where improving nutrition
and the end of chronic malnutrition have produced declining mortality
over the past three centuries or so.
28
But the less affl uent countries are now
closing the protein intake gap. In the developed world, diets are comprised
of ever more sugar, fats, and alcohol, which supply calories yet no protein.
By contrast, beans, high in protein, fi gure heavily in the diets of many in

developing countries.
29
It goes without saying, however, that a lowered age
of menarche can mean increased fertility, and more mouths to feed makes
escape from Third World status just that more diffi cult.
Moving from food-related health problems in the developing world to
others in the developed world, we have already observed that food pro-
cessing was given a considerable fi llip by the onset of industrialization, and
it has made incredible progress ever since especially during the last half-
century.
30
But government and consumer uneasiness has kept pace with
that progress – uneasiness about the use of additives in food processing
such as, to single out just one, the venerable preservative nitrate that turns
meat red. After all, additives are chemicals, and chemicals can be danger-
ous. Unquestionably, many of these were in the past, and surely many
more will prove to be in the future. So long as there are convenience and
processed foods there will be additives. The problem becomes one of when
their potential for harm outweighs their usefulness.
Salt is a good example. It is used in near mega-doses by almost all food
processors because it makes foods tastier, improves their appearance,
increases shelf life, and, not incidentally, adds to profi ts by adding weight