Poor Diets, Rich Food

I’m not talking about filet mignon or a consommé. I’m talking salt, sugar and fat. Salt of the Earth, fat of the land, streaming milk and honey. These things are naturally scarce in nature, or hard to extract. Yet humans love them. Who says we don’t like a challenge?

For much of history, these were the foods of gods, or at least of the rich guys who fancied themselves gods. But times have changed, and now the rich prefer to appear famished, and the poor bear the burden of eating ‘rich.’

The secret, of course, is that rich food is now extremely cheap: industrial meat and dairy, subsidized grain sweeteners, and chemical farming. Major food companies have achieved the greatest coup of the international, democratized era: giving poor people access to foods once unattainable. But this is no biblical feast. It's a cannibalistic nightmare in which the demand begets greater supply of what is proving deleterious to the demanding consumers throughout the global North, and increasingly throughout the entire globe.

This irony of global-historical proportions is being played out before our eyes: a recent AlterNet scoop details mega-company Nestlé’s plans to float a barge down Brazil’s Amazon River selling its wares to the Amazon basin’s denizens.

As Michelle Simon, a lawyer who writes about food industry marketing and politics, suggests, Nestlé’s initiative follows partly from concerns about Nestlé’s viability in saturated markets (i.e. the U.S.) where there is growing concern about the healthfulness of ‘rich’ foods in which Nestlé specializes. Candy, ice cream, cookies, coffee, chocolate, cereal and other products will be made available on the Brazilian barge in small, more cost-effective, quantities. Nestlé’s move almost guarantees success: people everywhere, it seems, love foods rich in sugar, salt and fat.
What’s this mean for those fighting for food justice on the home front? Markets, like floodwaters, always search for unsaturated places. Activists may find the power to curtail junk food companies’ marketing and distribution at home. They may uphold high nutrition standards and inspire a young generation to take control of its wellbeing. But the corn, soy and wheat will still flow, if not to domestic cities and towns then to whichever basin has not yet met the sparkling promise of globalized cosmopolitanism through packaged, processed eats.

It’s a harsh realization that as advocates in the U.S. fight for fresher, more wholesome diets, more unhealthy foods will potentially unload on the docks of foreign, untapped markets. This is, for some, a sign of growing wealth for folks marginalized in a globalizing economy. But is also, undoubtedly, a case of poor diets posing as rich foods and sold for cheap. What remains to be seen is whether a growing intra-national cause for saner food systems could ever leap into the vast international waters of business, trade and law.