“The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison.”
― Ann Wigmore
As stated by the nonprofit Bread For the World the most direct way to end hunger in the US is with national nutrition programs. While they are in place for low income students, they lack the real nutrients that growing children require. Jell-O passes as fruit, ketchup passes for a vegetable and the remainder of the food is heavily processed and fried. Getting these meals from the government system helps feed people, it does a poor job of doing so.
The least expensive foods are the worst for the human body. For a couple of dollars I can get a burger and soda at a fast food restaurant, but a salad at the same place costs five. Fresh food must be transported with enough speed to give it a couple of weeks of shelf life which, understandably, drives the price up. The more difficult the object is to harvest (Size, growing time, etc.) the more the price goes up, but few chemicals are used. The number of chemicals in a box of cereal is so staggering, it would seem that the chemicals used to make the cereal so long-lasting would be more expensive, but the efficiency of machines made food is far greater than the time it takes to collect and distribute fresh food. If fresh foods were grown and distributed with the same efficiency, they would be affordable to everyone and could be present in all school lunches. However this will not come to pass, until the government chooses to rectify a problem with substantial costs.
2 points.
ReplyDeleteI take objection to your claim that there are "chemicals in a box of cereal". There are many chemicals (obliquely), many of them have complicated names, and many of them are in your body. The fact that something contains "chemicals" means little more than that it contains "matter". There's also good reason for companies to use obfuscating names with their ingredients, because if everyone knew what went into it, other people could take their recipe. When the Twinkie was in fear of being discontinued, there were several recipes floating around as to how one would make their own twinkie, but no two were alike, even in the ingredients list.
Second, there's no way really to optimize fresh food production without additional preservatives and more "GMOs," the latest buzzword in the pseudohealth industry right now. As well, if we can make something in an hour (with "chemicals") why bother growing it in a year. There's no way to really optimize the system: healthy food will be the food of the rich.
At least the poor eat (and well), which is better than many countries can say.