Food

Abstract

This is the first period in the history of humankind when there are more people who are overweight than those suffering from malnutrition. The prediction that Paul Ehrlich put forward in the late 1960s, that the size of the Planet’s population would overcome food production by far, thus leading to huge famine, did not come true. In the 1990s, there has been a significant reduction in the number of people suffering from malnutrition though in the first decade of the new millennium this success slowed down. The other face of nutritional problems is the large number of overweight and obese people, a number that is rapidly increasing. Obesity is closely associated with the risk of diabetes, a phenomenon designated by the neologism “diabesity ”. The reasons for the “epidemic” of diabesity are not fully understood, though the main explanation is the decreased level of physical activity and the changes in diet , including calorie-rich foods. The relationship between the epidemiological changes and developments of the global food industry is still little explored. Macroscopic changes have taken place in the production and distribution of food, in particular the vertical integration of the TFP (transnational food processors ): the food industry can cover all the segments, from harvest to distribution, in an integrated system of a highly industrialised type. Another big change has been the foreign direct investments, i.e. the fact that transnational corporations (which answer to the shareholders and not directly to the clients) invest financially in food. The investment returns much more if the food is not simply a product of the land, grown and transported to the consumer, but if it is transformed. The more it is transformed, like fizzy drinks and packaged food, the greater the economic return. We are just scratching the surface of the impact of these changes on people’s health.