Whether it's suspicious spinach, suicidal snack foods, or, most recently, fatal fish, this has been the summer of food scares. Not even your pet is safe. Fido's Kibbles are just as deadly as the salad you're about to eat for lunch.
But is our food supply as deadly as news reports suggest, or have food attacks simply replaced shark attacks as cable news' filler of choice on slow news days? I'm not trying to minimize the seriousness of food-borne illness here. As stats (pdf) from the Center for Science in the Public Interest show, it's a real threat, particularly to developing nations. Contaminated food contributes to 1.5 billion cases of diarrhea in kids each year, resulting in more than 3 million unnecessary deaths.
In the United States, food-borne diseases result in 76 million illnesses and 5,000 deaths annually. These numbers sound large—until you put them in perspective. Influenza and pneumonia, for instance, together kill more than 61,000 Americans a year. But unless that flu is of the bird variety, we don't hear much about it. Food threats make for good news copy because they almost always emanate from the developing world.Wealthy nations have become so far removed from their food supplies that it's easy to shock people with stories of sketchy Chinese catfish farmers and uncouth Thai salmon brokers.
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But the real dangers inherent in our global food chain are far more quiet, and potentially more deadly, than headline-grabbing cases of E. coli. Consider obesity. Not that long ago, people everywhere ate with the seasons and with tastes that were dictated by regional conditions. But as it has become possible to eat anything, anywhere, at any time, the world has grown fatter. "Who cares?," you might say—it's nice to have fresh strawberries in the dead of winter.
Well, chew on this:
Global increases in the incidence and prevalence of obesity are grounded in the globalization of Western post-industrial food systems," writes Cornell University's Jeffrey Sobal. "Global corporations are establishing industrialized agro-food systems in almost all nations that will provide constant 24 hours a day/ 7 days a week/365 days a year consumer access to virtually unlimited volumes of relatively inexpensive calorifically dense foods to all people in all places at all times.... Global food systems and global vehicles, appliances, and mass media are the underlying causes of increases in global obesity."
Apparently, a flat world is a fat world.
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