by JAYATI GHOSH
The globalised fast-food culture now encourages wasteful and unhealthy patterns of food consumption.
A visit to a “food megastore” in Bologna, Italy sparked some of these reflections. “Eataly” is a chain started by the Italian businessman Oscar Farinetti five years ago with a shop in Turin. It has expanded rapidly to various other cities in Italy, the United States and Japan and is planning further expansion into many other countries with a model that seems unstoppable. The stores are huge (the one in New York covers 4,600 square metres; the store in Rome uses up an abandoned air terminal) and are hard to classify: a combination of grocery store, food court with cafes and bistros and restaurants, cooking appliance shop, venue for continuous lecture-demonstrations by butchers and bakers and pastry chefs and bookshop.
Slow Food movement
The concept has been described as a Disney World for foodies, but the underlying purpose is supposedly more serious. The idea is to create a commercially successful public training programme for the Slow Food movement—a movement of relatively recent Italian origin that focusses on reducing the time and distance between food production and consumption by relying on more local, seasonal and fresh ingredients and reducing the dependence upon factory processing.
In just five years this particular chain has become wildly successful, and there are similar stores and chains opening up in many places around the world, in fact everywhere that the numbers of more well-off consumers are increasing. This points to an unhappy contradiction, created by the inequality that this reflects in food consumption and its health implications.
The rich and better off in both developed and developing countries are seeking healthier forms of food consumption (and typically harking back to traditional cultivation practices, traditional forms of markets based on small producers and cooperatives and traditional recipes). But the poor in the developed world and increasingly the poor even in developing countries are being drawn away from these earlier healthier forms of food consumption as they get integrated into global supply chains and global food distribution all organised by mega agribusinesses.
The link between local supply and local consumption gets broken, and even in households that cannot afford it, wasteful and unhealthy patterns of food consumption are actively encouraged by aggressive marketing techniques. These have already had dire health effects in many developing countries. In the Pacific Islands and Melanesia, there are massive health problems and rising mortality associated with high cholesterol, diabetes and hypertension resulting from changing diets over the past generation, driven by corporate food marketing. In South Africa, surveys are finding obesity and malnutrition coexisting in poor children of poor households. In China and India, there is a significant increase in obesity-related diseases—not just among the rich and the older population, but even among children and in families that are not in the higher consumption categories.
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