1 billion people are hungry
May 11, 2010 9:44 AM Subscribe

While folks ponder the nutritional value of the new KFC "double down" sandwich, around the world 1 billion people go to bed each day hungry, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (F.A.O.) (BTW, If you define hunger or malnourishment in a different way, 1 billion could be just the tip of the iceberg.) Today the F.A.O. asked those who find the world hunger situation to be outrageous to join with them and "blow the whistle" on this silent crisis. MIT's media lab helped them set up an online networking tool to track the global spread of this movement. Jeremy Irons is on on board... and mad as hell.
posted by Kneebiter (67 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite

You know, the Double Down is a symptom of our own malnourishment crisis, not the cure.
posted by 2bucksplus at 9:55 AM on May 11, 2010 [13 favorites]

I thought this post started, "White folks ponder..."

That would have been quite a different post.
posted by kbanas at 9:57 AM on May 11, 2010 [2 favorites]

You know who else likes fried chicken?

That's right, I said it.
posted by flippant at 9:59 AM on May 11, 2010 [1 favorite]

Me? I like fried chicken. I prefer a chicken fried steak though.
posted by spicynuts at 10:01 AM on May 11, 2010

that jacques guy looks fat... just sayin.
posted by billybobtoo at 10:07 AM on May 11, 2010

You know who else likes fried chicken?

Who? Indonesians? They do have a ton of KFC knockoffs there.
posted by Burhanistan at 10:08 AM on May 11, 2010

In Nairobi, a place where the shadow of the colonial experience looms over everything, the KFC knock-off was an outfit called - of all things - "Southern Fried Chicken." Their logo was a Mississippi steamboat. It made my head explode every time I'd pass by. (But the chickenburgers went well with an orange Fanta.)
posted by bicyclefish at 10:15 AM on May 11, 2010 [4 favorites]

You know who else likes fried chicken?

I was going to guess the Chinese.
posted by jquinby at 10:15 AM on May 11, 2010 [1 favorite]

Who? Indonesians? They do have a ton of KFC knockoffs there.

Fair few in London too,
posted by jontyjago at 10:16 AM on May 11, 2010

Based on the goals of this project (mapping the reach of individuals interested in this issue), shouldn't the link to the 1billionhungry project somehow reflect that we're signing up from metafliter?
posted by billyfleetwood at 10:16 AM on May 11, 2010

To contribute some of my local statistics to this:

It is said that at least 50 million Indians are on the brink of starvation and over 200 million Indians are underfed. This, when a 60-million-ton surplus of foodgrains is rotting in various government warehouses in the country. (India - Politics of Starvation)

According to the Global Hunger Index, India ranks 65th out of 88 countries, with a hunger rate of 23.9. (300 million Indians go hungry every day!)

Stunting (deficiency in height for age) affects close to 195 million children under five years of age in the developing world. Of these, around 61 million – the largest number – live in India. Wasting (deficiency in weight for height) affects around 71 million children under five in the developing world. Of these, some 25 million are in India. And an estimated 129 million children under five in the developing world are underweight (that is deficient in weight for age – a composite measure of stunting and wasting). Of these, close to 54 million are children in India. In 2005-06, 43 per cent of Indian children below five years of age were underweight and 48 per cent were stunted. In China, only 7 per cent of similar children are underweight and 11 per cent are stunted. The corresponding levels of child malnutrition are much lower in Africa where 21 per cent of children below five years are underweight and 36 per cent are stunted. (Stunted India)
posted by mondaygreens at 10:16 AM on May 11, 2010 [5 favorites]

I thought this post started, "White folks ponder..."

Me too! I was like "what, fried chicken is good, but the double down isn't exactly fried chicken"
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:22 AM on May 11, 2010

I don't see any actual proposals about how to solve this on their site. Are they just too modest to suggest them?
posted by ecurtz at 10:25 AM on May 11, 2010 [3 favorites]

ecurtz, is this what you're looking for? http://www.1billionhungry.org/hunger/what-can-be-done/
a bit vague, i suppose...
posted by raw sugar at 10:28 AM on May 11, 2010

The Irons video is, well, just bad.
posted by HuronBob at 10:29 AM on May 11, 2010

You know, the Double Down is a symptom of our own malnourishment crisis

And a worldwide malnourishment crisis is a symptom of our own population crisis.

And I never want to hear that tired old "it's not a problem of production, but of distribution" trope ever again. That may have been the case 30 years and 3 billion people ago.
posted by sourwookie at 10:31 AM on May 11, 2010 [1 favorite]

Thanks, raw sugar, but I was actually just indulging in some gallows humor.
posted by ecurtz at 10:33 AM on May 11, 2010

And I never want to hear that tired old "it's not a problem of production, but of distribution" trope ever again. That may have been the case 30 years and 3 billion people ago.

What makes you think it's not true now? I was just reading a book on demographics and population, not the first one I've read, and was struck once again by how much hunger is caused by political decisions. mondaygreen's link above about stored grain in India seems to suggest it is a problem of distribution. What makes you think current hunger problems are caused by underproduction rather than politics?
posted by not that girl at 10:42 AM on May 11, 2010 [13 favorites]

And I never want to hear that tired old "it's not a problem of production, but of distribution" trope ever again. That may have been the case 30 years and 3 billion people ago.

It still seems to be a case of distribution. Only instead of being an issue of technological feasibility as it was 30 years ago, it's largely an issue of willpower and organization.

Quote:

The world produces enough food to feed everyone. World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day (FAO 2002, p.9). The principal problem is that many people in the world do not have sufficient land to grow, or income to purchase, enough food.

posted by tybeet at 10:45 AM on May 11, 2010 [4 favorites]

In Delhi (or maybe it was Amritsar), I went to a Sikh Gurudwara (temple/mosque) where they were handing out free food all day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. You can stay as long as you want and eat as much as you want. And it was good food. And as far as I know, no one was turned away. The Indian gov't should put the Sikhs in charge of food distribution to the poor.
posted by goethean at 10:56 AM on May 11, 2010

I don't see any actual proposals about how to solve this on their site. Are they just too modest to suggest them?
posted by ecurtz at 1:25 PM on May 11

The solution is to get governments out of the food distribution business. There is more than enough food produced globally to feed everyone, and more than enough technology to move it around in a timely, safe, and efficient way. When you examine this problem (and I have) you learn that the problem is government officials, at the local levels in particular, obstructing the channels to secure bribes, jobs for cronies, etc. The amount of food that rots in warehouses in Asia, India, and Africa is staggering.
posted by Pastabagel at 10:58 AM on May 11, 2010

And I never want to hear that tired old "it's not a problem of production, but of distribution" trope ever again. That may have been the case 30 years and 3 billion people ago.

Huh, do you have any evidence that's not the case? Keep in mind for every pound of beef, it takes 21 pounds of grain (cite)

Even if there wasn't enough food currently available (which I doubt) you could still boost food production an enormous amount by cutting back on meat products.
posted by delmoi at 11:10 AM on May 11, 2010 [2 favorites]

The solution is to get governments out of the food distribution business.

For-profit industry can barely be trusted to provide fair dealings with white, first-world paying customers; so how can we trust them to provide for starving third-worlders who by definition can't afford to eat?
posted by hamida2242 at 11:10 AM on May 11, 2010 [2 favorites]

The solution is to get governments out of the food distribution business. There is more than enough food produced globally to feed everyone, and more than enough technology to move it around in a timely, safe, and efficient way. When you examine this problem (and I have) you learn that the problem is government officials, at the local levels in particular, obstructing the channels to secure bribes, jobs for cronies, etc. The amount of food that rots in warehouses in Asia, India, and Africa is staggering.

The world produces enough food to feed everyone. World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day (FAO 2002, p.9). The principal problem is that many people in the world do not have sufficient land to grow, or income to purchase, enough food.

That's "enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day" if much of the food magically stops belonging to the citizens of the first world, and also magically appears on an equal basis in all rural, inaccessible, and/or poor areas. The infrastructure this would require is staggering; the cost and effort involved would make the international mail system look like chump change... except without the profits the mail returns to the countries which participate in it. And it would require millions if not billions of people to limit their diets in a major way, all for the benefit of people half a world away.

In other words, it's not happening. We humans have never had a 100% effective national food distribution system, much less a worldwide one; people go without everywhere, even in nations overflowing with plenty. We can talk all we want about "sufficient global political will", or we can admit that having a smaller population which can live sustainably (i.e. with land to grow, or income to purchase, enough food) is a hell of a lot more likely than an effective global consensus on this issue.
posted by vorfeed at 11:12 AM on May 11, 2010 [4 favorites]

We can talk all we want about "sufficient global political will", or we can admit that having a smaller population which can live sustainably (i.e. with land to grow, or income to purchase, enough food) is a hell of a lot more likely than an effective global consensus on this issue.

What makes you think achieving a lower population living sustainably is any more likely than achievement of an efficient food distribution? If you believe the various folks who comment on declining birthrates around the world, we're headed toward the lower population (the most recent book I read on the subject was The Coming Population Crash), but I can't see why you think, if there's no hope of distributing food evenly, there is more hope of equitably distributing income or land.
posted by not that girl at 11:20 AM on May 11, 2010

Huh. Lots of arable land down there in Los Alamos, vorfeed? Or is worrying about this stuff just for the little people?
posted by Justinian at 11:21 AM on May 11, 2010

we can admit that having a smaller population which can live sustainably (i.e. with land to grow, or income to purchase, enough food) is a hell of a lot more likely than an effective global consensus on this issue.

In lots of places, there is land to grow food, but trade policies - subsidies and tariffs, both locally and in other countries - make it uneconomical to do so.

People have been ringing the alarm about overpopulation and overtaxed food production capabilities at least since Malthus, and probably long before. It's currently trendy again, but it's as bogus as it's ever been. There may well be good reasons to think there are too many people on the planet, but an inability to feed them ain't one of them.

Plus, it's morally pretty disgusting. "People are starving? Oh, well that's just because there are too many people! Once the excess population starves off, we'll be fine!" Whether or not it's correct that there are "too many" people, the fact is that there are these people, and they are people, and it's pretty awful - of you, me, our government, anyone - to just write them off and let them starve.
posted by nickmark at 11:34 AM on May 11, 2010 [4 favorites]

Is there enough food for Everyone?
posted by Freen at 11:37 AM on May 11, 2010 [2 favorites]

Hunger remains entirely a problem of distribution, and of the politics that affect distribution. People starve and suffer malnourishment because there is not sufficient global political will to eliminate starvation and malnourishment, a fact which should embarrass every government on the planet.

This.

That's "enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day" if much of the food magically stops belonging to the citizens of the first world, and also magically appears on an equal basis in all rural, inaccessible, and/or poor areas.

I think the real point isn't that we will all start eating our rationed soylent dinners, every person on the planet receiving their allotted 2720 kcal. It's that the canard of "too many people!" -- which always seems to really mean "too many poor brown people" -- isn't correct, in that there is a huge amount of improvement possible in the current distribution regimen at current population levels.
posted by Forktine at 11:39 AM on May 11, 2010 [2 favorites]

Just to be clear, world hunger is a result of war, inefficient agriculture, lack of basic infrastructure - including irrigation and supply chains, lack of capital and mechanization, poor education outcomes, corruption, and, of course, climate change.

While exploding populations do not help, managed correctly and sustainably, there are enough resources on the planet to feed everyone.

So stop praying for a human die-off. Or if you do and you are part of the 20% of the world's population that consumes 80% of the resources, either kill yourself, or consider getting rid of your car, your fridge, your TV, your internet (you can keep your cell phone), your electricity, and running water, in order to reduce your eco-footprint.
posted by KokuRyu at 11:45 AM on May 11, 2010 [2 favorites]

Or what Forktine said.
posted by KokuRyu at 11:45 AM on May 11, 2010

@nickmark - I don't think that vorfeed was implying that we should let those who are hungry just starve off and that we'll be better off for it. Where I live, population control is a gigantic problem, and ironically also the most achievable one, in the long run.

I might get dissed for making this comparison, but I work a lot with street animals where I live. There are millions of them, and although they don't starve to death as often as you might think, they do have really, really terrible lives - living in the heat, always being kicked and hungry - which are often cut tragically short by speeding vehicles and rampant diseases (I worked in a government shelter for a while)...

On the ground level, it is really, really difficult to redistribute food in any kind of sustainable way. (The Golden Temple someone mentioned above is fantastic, yes, and they feed visitors tirelessly - it's amazing to behold, but it is also the most significant religious place for Sikhs - and I'm talking Sikhs all over the world, who make shitloads of money and own much of the incredibly fertile lands of the Punjab.) For animals, sterilization is really the only thing that works - as far as I have looked and tried.

Why I make the comparison is because, 1) the government is entirely apathetic in both cases, and 2) while the condition of street animals is far less of a concern to the government, human beings who are born in poor - don't even have to be starving anymore, since we've thoroughly embraced consumerism here and ideas of what's enough are changing radically among lower- and middle- income households - families are inevitably born into lives of endless labor and little to no education. What I'm saying is, if you're born in a starving family, the chances of your ever finding a life which is not ruled by hunger are very remote.

It's a cliche and I'm sorry it offends your sense of morality, but in the long term, at least for India, population control really is the most achievable solution.
posted by mondaygreens at 11:51 AM on May 11, 2010

Theoretically, though - yes, redistribution would solve a lot, if not everything.
posted by mondaygreens at 11:53 AM on May 11, 2010

Hunger remains entirely a problem of distribution

Kind of like money.

How have hunger problems been solved in the past? Mass migrations during localized famines is one way (to areas of more abundance). But due to the nature of nation states and their border regulations those are rather constrained. Same with just regular old distribution and shipping: constrained by politics and further regulations. Land grabs by transnationals can create jobs for locals to grow non-food crops in exchange for wages, but those wages are too often not enough to buy food from the global marketplace and displace subsistence farming operations that might have been more stable (and are further dependent on responsible government management of the local currency).

Sure because third world businessmen are super-efficient! They would never do anything like, try to gain a monopoly, or use withhold food in order to boost the price. Just look at how well things worked out when Enron deregulated electricity production!

This would be the danger of relying on the global market for your food supply (especially for a developing country). Your food supply would be subject to the global markets whims and there might only be a few dealers and something like this could plausibly happen. Of course, there's no reason the global market can't be an excellent backup solution in hard times.

But getting to the point: has this ever happened? Cite? To start off it doesn't seem like an economically viable strategy. You would end up selling a couple things and the rest would rot. Why wouldn't you lower the price so that you could sell them all and get every penny you could from these starving people?
posted by symbollocks at 11:55 AM on May 11, 2010

Sure because third world businessmen are super-efficient! They would never do anything like, try to gain a monopoly, or use withhold food in order to boost the price. Just look at how well things worked out when Enron deregulated electricity production!
posted by delmoi at 2:11 PM on May 11

How is one third-world businessman going to affect the market for food in a country like India with a billion people? A businessman can cut production all he wants, another businessman will boost his production to capture all those lost sales.

Electricity is a natural monopoly, food distribution isn't. See also, Microecon 102.
posted by Pastabagel at 11:58 AM on May 11, 2010

A businessman can cut production all he wants, another businessman will boost his production to capture all those lost sales.

Doesn't work like that here - there are food subsidies and a lot more profits for businessmen when mass hoarding happens. (Hard to find links for this on call, but some more info is here.)
posted by mondaygreens at 12:07 PM on May 11, 2010

I'm going to say something controversial here:

The Double Down is Fucking Delicious.

I want one right now.
posted by empath at 12:12 PM on May 11, 2010 [2 favorites]

Even "population control" is not a mystery fix. I believe putting the means of being able to safely and effectively control birth rates in the hands of women (i.e. "the pill") throughout Africa and Asia and you'll start seeing the trends we are already experiencing in N. America and Europe.

But. I do agree wholeheartedly that we are able to feed everyone living on Earth today, and, provide safe drinking water. good lord, if all the money that went into WWII and subsequent clusterfucks of mainly men having biggest dick contests went into actually the betterment of global society we wouldn't be having this argument. We'd be friggen arguing about weather we should fund another Mars colony. If we can reliably deliver missiles to the most godforsaken corners of the earth we certainly can provide food as well.
posted by edgeways at 12:29 PM on May 11, 2010

I want one right now.

I hear crack has the same effect.
posted by edgeways at 12:31 PM on May 11, 2010

Crack is also delicious.
posted by empath at 12:35 PM on May 11, 2010 [1 favorite]

It's a cliche and I'm sorry it offends your sense of morality, but in the long term, at least for India, population control really is the most achievable solution.

I didn't mean to be dismissing population control as an important long-term tool (indeed, I strongly agree with the need for controlling growth not just because of food issues), but it is that - a long-term tool. It doesn't address the short-term problem. We can agree on the importance of population control as a long-term tool, but we're still left with the problem of a whole lot of hungry people today - people who could be fed if governments honestly gave a shit, which they too frequently don't (as you noted). In the case of street animals, you might be able to manage with just a long-term tool, but when you're talking about human lives, I don't see an ethical approach that doesn't attempt to solve both short-term and long-term problems.

You're right that saying "having a smaller population which can live sustainably" is not quite the same as saying "let the excess folks die off," but it's also not the same as saying "we need better population control for the long term," because the only way to have a smaller population is for people to die.

But ultimately, as you yourself noted, while population control (and I particularly mean limiting the growth of population) might be one of the best long-term tools we have, the argument from several commenters here has been that "excess" population is the at the heart of the problem - that is, that there are too many people and not enough food - which is not the case, and it was that point that I (along with others, and indeed your first post) sought to rebut.
posted by nickmark at 12:55 PM on May 11, 2010

What makes you think achieving a lower population living sustainably is any more likely than achievement of an efficient food distribution?

Because I think we're much more likely to starve, plague, and/or kill ourselves into population crashes on the local level than we are to equally distribute food on the global level. Nature has a way of adjusting unsustainable local populations... and I never said we'd do it the easy way. I don't think that's a good thing, but it is one obvious outcome if things don't change.

Also, like mondaygreens and edgeways said, population control may be an easier problem to solve. In fact, I think the canard about "political will" is covering for an actual blind spot in our political will -- dismissing things that may help as "disgusting" ignores the fact that widespread starvation and poverty is already disgusting. We denounce the idea that there are too many people, yet we are more than happy to commit the sin of population control through inaction, starvation, and resulting conflict... how is that better than considering active population control? Why is quantity-of-life-over-quality-of-life the only rubric by which we measure this problem?

Huh. Lots of arable land down there in Los Alamos, vorfeed?

Actually, there is. People have farmed and raised livestock in the Espanola Valley for 400+ years, and there's plenty of local food to be bought. Not enough to be a sole food source for as many people as we have, of course, but see above...

Or is worrying about this stuff just for the little people?

Of course it's not. The fact that we've allowed our food and water to become totally dependent on complicated, non-local systems is going to bite us in the ass over the next 100 years. We need to invest in local food/water and sustainable practices today, lest we lose the ability to live where we're living tomorrow.

Unsustainable local populations -- and that's many if not most of us, thanks to population centralization and the globalization of the food supply -- are playing musical chairs with the future of human civilization. That's the truth, and you can tell me I'm awful and disgusting and should kill myself for saying it... but if you expect an even more complicated distribution system to solve this problem, you'd better hope the music never, ever stops.
posted by vorfeed at 12:56 PM on May 11, 2010

There's been a lot of talk about people in the US being food-insecure - not having confidence in having adequate food. I find it a bit hard to take (almost typed hard to swallow). We have too many calories, and many people get a poor mix of calories. Lots of cheap, corn-syrup-based too-sweet, high-fat foods, not enough whole grains, veggies, fruits. Even the poor in the US have food, even if it's not ideal. It's useful to remember that many people in the world would love to have that problem.

For many people, good food is available, but crappy food is more immediately appealing. Water's cheap or free, and clean in most of the U.S., but people drink soda. Beans are cheap and nutritious, but people eat fast food burgers. Traditional Mexican food as prepared by families, is healthy and affordable. In big cities, there may be no place to get nutritious food, and the adverts for crap food are everywhere, and the corner market will accept food stamps for those doritos.

In the US, I blame it on Beeg Bidness. Megacorp's ads make even me, who knows how nasty commercially-prepared ground beef is, want a burger and fries. Those fries, deep-fried in oil that's been at high temps for too long, will just goop your heart full of greasy plaque. The burger has to be well-cooked to kill the endemic e.coli. BeegEeveelMegaCorp has a hand in Congress, so you better bet you can use food stamps to buy crap that will kill ya, and they'll manipulate the school lunch program if they can.

They own the farms, the genetic patents on the crops, and they control food processing. Read Barbara Kingsolver's book. Want to grow chickens on a small scale, and butcher them on a small scale? Good luck, pal. BeegEeveelMegaCorp got to the lawmaker, and you have to take your 250 home grown, free-range roasters to a BeegEeveel slaughterhouse, which may be filthy with salmonella and other nasties. And it's 4 hours away, and they don't take groups of chickens under at least 1,000.

In the US, we have an abundance of cheap food, and we get way too much of what we paid for - cheap food.

In the euphemistically-labeled developing nations, people are often forced off the land, economically driven to cities. Remember the hate for Nestle? Because they persuaded women that powdered food is healthier than breastfeeding. They gave free samples, and persuaded the health care workers to promote infant formula. Lactation stops if it's not used. Then you have to buy the formula, and there's no clean water, and you can't afford it, so you add water.

I'm really just on a rant. Go give some money to Oxfam, or anybody else who helps feed people. Have beans and rice and some tomato salsa for dinner, and feel happy that you have an abundance of food available to you. And tell your legislator you want clean food.
posted by theora55 at 12:58 PM on May 11, 2010 [2 favorites]

Yeah, the Double Down isn't the worst fast food offender--it isn't even the worst chicken fast food offender. I realize that we're trying to keep things topical, but come on.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:01 PM on May 11, 2010

Yes @ nickmark. Short-term solutions are just a great deal more fraught and very difficult to measure (and also very slow to refine). Like you said, food is just one of many problems, but it's the first problem. You can't even have a conversation without it. On an individual level, other than getting mad as hell, I still think that reproductive education is the most sensible and grassroots way of enabling real, difficult-to-measure but easy-to-see change in the lives of people facing very basic problems - food being the biggest one.
posted by mondaygreens at 1:09 PM on May 11, 2010

Suicide for Sustainability!
posted by vortex genie 2 at 1:11 PM on May 11, 2010

Maternal Health Care for Sustainability is less catchy, but more effective.
posted by anthill at 1:59 PM on May 11, 2010 [2 favorites]

How is one third-world businessman going to affect the market for food in a country like India with a billion people? A businessman can cut production all he wants, another businessman will boost his production to capture all those lost sales.

Well, they could buy out and out compete their competitors, like Standard Oil, or they could form a cartel and price-fix. The point is, third world bussinessmen are no more scrupulous then 3rd world bureaucrats. You're just spouting freemarket fundementalist nonsense.

Electricity is a natural monopoly, food distribution isn't. See also, Microecon 102.

Electricity distribution is a natural monopoly, but generation isn't. In most states you can put solar panels on your roof and sell back electricity today. Thanks, of course, to regulation that mandates it.

_{(of course, electricity distribution is a fundamentally government enabled activity. It would be impossible without legal rights of way and other things that allow power companies to put up wiring without negotiating with every single landowner -- so it's more then reasonable for the government to regulate it. No regulation would mean no centralized electricity for everyone. We'd all be running diesel generators in our basements)}
posted by delmoi at 2:13 PM on May 11, 2010 [2 favorites]

When I digitized the training materials for KFC a looooooooong time ago, they used a series of laminated cards put up inside their kitchens to show the workers how to process the fresh chicken that came into the store.

The black Star Cards showed how to make a perfect chicken leg by cutting the meat JUST SO, wrapping the skin around the bone and popping the end through so it'd fry into the perfect shape. They also listed all the "adulterants" to look for in the shipments (vermin, insects, etc.) and the diseases people could get from eating tainted product, along with the symptoms identifying each one.

We called them the "DeathStar Cards."
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 2:48 PM on May 11, 2010

I run an urban agriculture non-profit. Just today we finished unpacking/composted/breaking down the boxes of close to $20,000 worth of fruit which had gone bad. Peaches, grapes and nectarines, all carefully packaged and shipped from Chile. Eleven pallets -- some of them stacked 8' high. Not only does it break the heart to see all this food wasted-but hundreds and hundreds of heavy duty boxes, and each peach or nectarine cradled in its own plastic crib.

I agree that it is distribution problem, but there are a whole bevy of other problems that are wrapped in a complex web of "modernity". What is interesting to me is (in the first world) how many people still think it is up to someone else to grow their food-and that just "dialogue-ing" will help. Let's talk talk talk about the problem (uuugghhhh).......this a participatory activity, not a spectator sport.

Humanity continues on the viscous cycle of food production/population growth/food depletion/population decline. What else is new?
posted by tarantula at 2:56 PM on May 11, 2010

this whole discussion makes me feel really awful that I take pills to keep myself from eating too much.
posted by Uther Bentrazor at 3:09 PM on May 11, 2010

For animals, sterilization is really the only thing that works - as far as I have looked and tried.

Woah, back the truck up. Comparing starving people to street animals is kind of repugnant (yes, it does offend my "morality", or more accurately; it offends me). Advocating forced sterilization is a whole nother level. Moreover it's already been tried in India, and it was a human rights disaster of epic proportions.

"After a police attack on the Muslim village of Uttawar, southwest of Delhi, 800 vasectomies were performed—giving Uttawar, as the Indian Express noted, "the dubious distinction of probably having every eligible male sterilized." Across North India, villagers often slept in the fields to avoid the sterilization teams, or hid in their houses during the day"

Furthermore, - and not surprisingly - it didn't work.

"Upon learning of these semi-forced, safety-negligent policies, we get what is likely to be a fairly accurate explanation why family planning efforts have failed to curb rampant population growth in India. When the only option available to many people is one that is irreversible, not to mention potentially life-threatening, people would probably be inclined to opt for no contraceptives at all. In such a scenario, the problem is not solved and the population keeps growing and resources per head keep dwindling. "

Birth control is certainly an important issue that is worth discussing and promoting, but anyone advocating forced sterilisation - in developing countries of all places - is too ignorant and/or naive to make a valuable contribution to that discussion. They need to listen, not talk.
posted by smoke at 5:06 PM on May 11, 2010

Humanity continues on the viscous [sic] cycle of food production/population growth/food depletion/population decline.

The thing is, we don't. What do you think it means to say that "World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase"? We aren't a bunch of yeast floating around in a closed system, and while there have been awful, horrible instances of localized famine - and chronic starvation that affects massive populations - the human population continues to grow, and our food production does too. Even on a localized scale, I'm not aware of any human population crash that can be attributed to food depletion (speaking of the modern era).

I am sorry about your shipment of fruit. What a waste.
posted by nickmark at 5:58 PM on May 11, 2010

NICKMARK, there is a fascinating book by David Montgomery titled "Dirt, The Erosion of Civilizations" (link on Amazon). One of his theories is that human populations generally run 13-14 generations before they deplete the soils/natural resources and the population decline begins. If we start with Ben Franklin, America (the birthplace of the "green revolution") is right at that sweet spot. I do not know what you consider to be the modern era, but there have been many many examples of population decline due to food scarcity over the past 5000 years (again, see David Montgomery's book). One of the exceptions has been around the Euphrates River, which had maintained a stable civilization for thousands of years until this decade - they have finally destroyed the fertility of the valley due to the cycles of damming/salianation. Yes, the last 100 years has seen an unprecedented population rise, but if the patterns over the past 50 centuries continue, we can anticipate a decline at the equivalent scale. A couple other good books to spend some time with if you are interested in this topic : 1491 and Collapse.
posted by tarantula at 7:55 PM on May 11, 2010

Humanity continues on the vicious cycle of food production/population growth/food depletion/population decline.

I dunno, I'd think safe, reliable, relatively unintrusive birth control would throw a wrench in the works, if it were available to all women. It seems that most women don't really want to have more than 2 children, maybe 3, when they can control it -- especially if they know they can afford to feed 2 children but not 6.
posted by palliser at 8:05 PM on May 11, 2010

@smoke... Woah is right. As in, hold your horses. Of course I don't mean forced sterilization. There is nothing more repugnant than that. I made another post later which clarified that - even though I didn't think it needed clarification - I said, on the ground, reproductive education is doable, even by individuals on a one-to-one basis (something as simple as providing free birth control to your household help - mostly women - can help them take control of their lives and provide better resources to the children they do decide to have).

As for my comparison - I don't think animals should be forced to suffer horrible lives any more than humans do, even if they fall below you on the food chain. When street animals are born unchecked, there literally is not enough food for them (since it must be donated or thrown away by humans first) and certainly nowhere near enough medical care. The idea of "forced" sterilization is moot in this case of course - if that's where you thought I was going with my comparison, well, I really really was not.
posted by mondaygreens at 9:30 PM on May 11, 2010

Yes, but how many people go to bed sober?
posted by klangklangston at 9:35 PM on May 11, 2010

PS: We can argue about distribution and government apathy all we want, but please read the statistics I posted above - Indian children are abysmally underfed and it isn't limited to rural India... although I live in a supposedly cosmopolitan city, most of the uneducated women I've known (laundress, garbagewoman, women I've worked with in literacy camps) have insane numbers of children. My last laundress had eight and was a shell of a woman, not unlike the female street dog who lives outside my house, who had about four litters in as many years (only two of 20+ puppies survived on the street, and two were adopted after we placed the last last litter up for adoption) before we went out and got educated and paid for her sterilization and post-op care. If women don't have reproductive education and choice, their bodies are used in pretty similar ways (disgusting but true). So - again - this is at least doable and it is part of the solution. It's all I can do, really, other than sign petitions and rail at my fucking government.
posted by mondaygreens at 9:46 PM on May 11, 2010

My last laundress had eight and was a shell of a woman, not unlike the female street dog who lives outside my house

I know you mean well, and I understand the point you are trying to make -- but could you please stop comparing poor people to street animals? It's a distasteful reminder of unpleasant former political excesses, and it's the kind of language that lets people hint right up against immoral things (like forced sterilization and eugenics) without actually saying those things. You personally may not be a fan of eugenics and the like, but you are borrowing from that discourse.
posted by Forktine at 9:56 PM on May 11, 2010 [1 favorite]

Thanks for clearing that up MondayGreens, and my apologies for misinterpreting you.

At the same time - whilst I agree with your broader points - as Forktine notes, these comparisons are really pretty off-colour: "My last laundress had eight and was a shell of a woman, not unlike the female street dog who lives outside my house".

Just not really cool, however much you venerate animals.
posted by smoke at 10:12 PM on May 11, 2010

All right let me take one last stab at being precise: in this context, (reproductive) education / choice is what differentiates humans from animals. If a woman is uneducated, coerced to copulate and then constitutionally or culturally denied the right to choose whether or not to have a child, then I don't buy that human beings are better off being human beings. And I'm not just comparing poor people to animals, but all people - I defined the scope of my comparison above. The underpinnings of your own argument are humanist, which I find a fairly to be a fairly arrogant stance - but I think on both (semantic) sides it's utterly counterproductive to read too much between the lines. People will continue to appropriate whatever they want from a conversation or polemic to further their own sick agendas - if I keep second-guessing myself in that way I might as well never speak.
posted by mondaygreens at 10:23 PM on May 11, 2010 [1 favorite]

PS:... uneducated because, say, she began working at the age of 8 because her parents not only did not have the money to send her to school (there are free schools) but needed the extra pair of hands more than they didn't want the extra mouth to feed.

PS: Yes, it isn't cool. None of this is cool!
posted by mondaygreens at 10:26 PM on May 11, 2010

Sure thing, Mondaygreens, but fyi; mefi is a pretty humanist place, and you may find that comments like that in the wrong thread will provoke a reaction far in excess of my own personal response - so far in excess, in fact, that it makes said response look like a one line haiku about clouds.

I don't think refraining from what - regardless of your opinion - are fairly obviously quite topical if not inflammatory comparisons really equate to second-guessing everything you say.

But enough from me. Broadly we're on the same page here, and any further discussion belongs in metatalk, if anywhere, and apologies all for the derail.
posted by smoke at 11:15 PM on May 11, 2010

Is it just me, or does Jeremy Irons look like he needs a hot meal?
posted by chavenet at 3:53 AM on May 12, 2010

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