Junk Food is a dangerous “normal”. It has to go! - Day #18 (11 April 2020) 21 day #Covid19 Lock down

Day #18 ( 11 April 2020)

Junk Food is a dangerous “normal”. It has to go!

I was reading some very foodie things! The virus is an all-round celebrity! It has got a lot of people to even write foodie things with it! Now, don’t get me wrong, I was not talking about eating the virus! Don’t be surprised, nowadays, you talk about any animal, even cockroaches, and some one in the crowd will come up with stories on how such-and-such a nation eats cockroaches and that they have a factory producing it, and so on. By the way, they could be right, and again, you guessed the nation right!

Stories related to food and the virus, or the lock down following the Covid19, were initially about how people rush to groceries and pick up ( ransack!) essential food items to stock for a long haul. It was quickly followed with all sorts of experts prescribing what kind of food is good and what is bad during a Covid attack; what the young, the old and the normal people should eat; what women should eat, so on and so forth. Then there was a series of articles and messages on how one can boost their immunity to defend against the virus with nutritional supplements, certain vitamin intake, and even detailed suggestions of vegetables, fruits, herbs and exercises, like yoga, that can help. And there was this weeks of discussion on immunity - herd immunity to be specific, that the British believed is their approach, but were shocked by the estimates of deaths that this can cause. But, for our case, yes, immunity was also discussed!

So, that brings us to the question – are we as a species, strong enough, bodily, to resist the Covid19 virus? Meaning, even if the virus infects us, will we survive by our strength or immunity? With the number of affected people in 210 nations and territories reaching 18,46, 833 and the number of deaths 1,13,883, inspite of all the medical systems overworking, we can never be sure!

We could always say that this virus is highly infectious and that there is a certain set of vulnerable population that is at a higher risk. That is the point I wish to make. This vulnerable population is a very very large number, one that we worked hard to create, over a century, perhaps. Let me explain.

WHO says that as on 2017, 1.9 billion adults were overweight and 650 million obese, globally. An estimated 41 million children preschool were overweight. High blood pressure, heart diseases, diabetes and certain types of cancers are attributed to overweight and obesity. Increased consumption of junk food – primarily high energy carbohydrate, fat, salt and sugar rich diets are the cause for most of them. ( https://www.who.int/features/factfiles/obesity/en/ ).

UNICEF in its 2019 report finds that around 200 million children under-five are either undernourished or overweight, while one-in-three globally - and almost two-thirds of children between the fragile ages of six months to two years - are not fed food that nurtures proper development. (https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/10/1049261 )

This is the “normal” that we have been living in for a very very long time. To bring us to this “normal” Governments, food technologists, the chemical and food industry, the large retail chains and consumers(we!) have invested billions of dollars, and today we have a few billion people in the vulnerable or high risk category with a health condition that may not resist the onslaught of a Covid19 like disease.

We have not only been “trained” to consume the junk that is produced but also been “trained” to bring up a generation specifically on this kind of food. One just needs to look back into your homes! So many of our young now do not know what natural, healthy food befitting human consumption actually is. The crisis is also that we have also been “trained” not to know or respond to the fact that while we consume this food, the industry that produces this may have impoverished large communities and denuded forests and natural ecosystems to produce the ingredients that go into the junk food – for instance soya, meat and palm oil. There could be many others. So, this “normal” of ours is about too much of the dirty, unhealthy kind of food for one large side of the population, and deprivation of adequate nutritious food for the other side of the population. Together taken, both the have’s and the have-not’s now form nearly half the world’s population, vulnerable, immunity compromised and waiting for a virus!

I believe we will come out of the Covid19 crisis in a few months time. The sufferings have been huge and costly. Economically we may take a long time to recover. Meanwhile, will we ever do anything with the learning?

In this case, it is about a simple, fundamental and the most essential act of Eating – and the fact that we must eat better than we did before we got into the Covid crisis.

The act and hence the policy around eating, that is about the individual, family and the society and eventually the nation and the world, should mean that we have enough for all of us. Equity is the word, and there must be Food justice – an assurance that nobody goes hungry. The policy should also be that such food is healthy, natural, safe and locally specific to the culture and the ecology of the region. This is one fundamental need that has been hugely compromised with food becoming standardised, manipulated to make it homogeneous, universally available and available all through the year, everywhere, industrially produced and globalised for all populations. Food has also been dangerously infused with chemicals, including pesticides used at various stages of its production.

And lastly, food is one of the biggest economic drivers. Starting from the farmers to a chain of other enterprises that bring the produce from the farm to the plate, in processed or raw form is a massive chain. But today, the farming community globally is facing a crisis of survival, unprecedented in history. This has also to change. The hands that feed the world cannot be let to die. Infact, they should be in the first line of people who will have to prosper in a changed world.

If we are to look at the collapse of the health of the world, then the industrial food production system is the No.1 culprit, and that has to go. It has to be replaced with a large shift to Community Food systems, large and small, bringing together the individual, the private and the public, that can cater to the real needs of a “post-normal” world.

Here it is interesting to note that even within states, we have different sects of people in different levels of a compromised immunity status. One needs to go beyond conventional reasons to look at,for instance, why the Blacks and the Hispanic populations across various Covid19 hit states in the US are having higher rates of deaths than the whites. In Chicago, more than 70% of the deaths related to the coronavirus were among black residents, though black residents make up only a third of the city’s population. In Michigan, black residents make up just 14% of the population, but over 40 percent of the Covid-19 deaths. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/opinion/coronavirus-poor-black-latino.html )

I am not directly attributing this to only junk food, but the fact that this population is addicted to junk food, and that this is cheaper and hence preferred is also matters that need further exploration. Similarly, in nations that still have some community food systems intact, have held on to the virus attack, inspite of poverty and lack of resources. The fact remains that in such populations, like in India, the local food systems are not as disrupted as in the cities of developed nations. Even in the major cities of India, we can see people having healthier diets. For example,green leafy vegetables are a daily staple among most of the residents of the Chennai city. But this is also changing with a changing preference among the youth.

Rajesh Krishnan, a bio-technologist turned organic paddy farmer and entrepreneur has an interesting take on this. He says, “We were always a foraging species. When the lock down hit us, I picked up a book that had compiled information about the herbs and edible green leafy vegetables found in our gardens and homesteads. I wanted to see which of them I can find around my home. I could identify and pick so many of them. Our elder farmers here know all of them by name, use, properties and the way to consume them. We are so rich in the diversity of our freely growing food and the knowledge of it as well.” A friend, Priyanka, had earlier helped us compile information about edible leafy vegetables that grow in paddy fields. She found more than 80 of them. Most of them are still consumed by the tribals and villagers in Wyanad, Kerala, making it a free, easy available source of nutrition. This could largely be true of most country side in India. This is the kind of food and knowledge that needs to be integrated into the present food basket. This is the kind that will give local food security and resilience, both at the society as well as at the individual level, even as we conserve our ecosystems.

With the sagacity that comes with farming, Rajesh added, “but modern man still forages; look at how he goes from supermarket to supermarket to pick up all that junk food, and today, we are foraging using the mobile and an app!”. Agreed, it’s the same fingers and hands, but are we making sure it is healthy food!

One thing is very clear, this “normal” into which the economic world will simply go back post-Covid is is too dangerous for humanity! Thousands of very sustainable models are growing up all over the world, that is demonstrating the possibility of a sustainable, resilient food system! The Community Food systems approach has a future and it just needs us now. We need not wait for the next virus or a disaster to adopt them into our homes and the society.