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World Food Center: Good Food For All
Accessibility of Foods
If obesity depends to some extent on the overeating of food, then removing access to that food should logically lead to a reduction in cases of obesity.
On the other hand, easy access to foods and intensive marketing efforts to promote frequent overconsumption can increase the prevalence of obesity. Of course, the principal issue with accessibility to food globally is the lack of food security faced by many millions of people. Although the green revolution of the 1970s led to the massive increase in the productivity of rice and wheat strains, alleviating problems of endemic starvation for millions, there continue to be many problems for those vulnerable peoples whose lives are threatened by climate change and environmental degradation. he inevitable added pressure of irrigation water needs have intensive concerns over the depletion of clean water sources for some of the very poorest people.
However, in terms of obesity, accessibility implies a positive correlation between the presence of food and the overindulgence in eating. The human body and human societies have spent centuries or millennia evolving to the relative presence or scarcity of foods and devoting resources to ensuring the availability of some fresh, or at least edible food for as long as possible.
This has led to the salting and drying of meats, fish, and fruit; the pickling of vegetables; and the various technologies of smoking, preserving, and bottling.
In countries in which naturally occurring spices and herbs are few (as in Britain and much of northern Europe), this promoted the enormously high prices of spice trade commodities and possibly stimulated the drinking of wine or beer to vary the endlessly salty taste of food for the majority of the year. In other countries, it has provided the foods that are now the staples and delicacies of their respective cuisines; kimchi in Korea is one notable example of this.
For the majority of people the majority of the time, food was very basic and involved a measure of the staple carbohydrate mixed with a small amount of vegetable or protein. Societies fortunate enough to live in climates in which fruit grows year-round have a natural alternative source of energy and, in pre modern years, those people tended to be stronger and healthier than those from colder climes. However, as agricultural productivity has improved and economic development has led to increased incomes for many millions of people around the world, it has become possible for people to eat the food once reserved for feasts or other special occasions on a regular basis, perhaps even on a daily basis.
This has led to an imbalance with the ways in which human bodies have evolved in order to deal with the intake of calories. The sudden, massive, and regular increase in calories has led to numerous problems with obesity from people whose bodies cannot cope with this unprecedented diet. This is a relatively recent development: in most of the Western world there was widespread threat of famine as recently as the years following World War II (post-1945).
Globalization, too, has had an impact on accessibility of food and its relationship with obesity. First, food from around the world is now available in many places year-round. Those foods may have originally been designed as special feast foods or else as part of a specialized local diet. Taken from their context and perhaps adapted to local tastes by the addition of sweet or salty additives, these foods can cause rapid weight gain in bodies unadapted to them. The significant increase in obesity in many of the developing countries of East Asia may be attributed at least in part to this phenomenon, as Western foods (including dairy foods and chocolate-based confectionery) have been introduced in great quantities in societies in which they were previously almost entirely unknown.
Second, globalization also spreads different ideas and concepts of how other people around the world live. he accessibility of other cultures brings with it both the foods of other cultures and the encouragement to try these new foods. The massive amount of marketing money behind the internationalization of American fast-food chains underscores the extent to which it is possible to change eating behavior through these means.
A third implication of globalization is that it changes eating patterns. Partly through providing evidence of alternative lifestyles in which the historical nuclear or extended family ate the same food at the same time, and partly through creating different types of working life and lifestyle, globalization has changed the ways in which societies deal with food and eating. There has been a tendency to cause people to work longer, to eat at their desks, to graze throughout the waking day rather than at set times and to favor speed and taste rather than quality and nutrition.
These factors have been supported by the incredibly successful development of creation and distribution chains. In conjunction with the global phenomenon of urbanization, this has made possible a lifestyle, in which obesity is a prevalent risk, whatever the attractions of that lifestyle. Habits and customs designed to enable the body to maximize the caloric value of foods in a time when food security was in short supply are now largely counterproductive among people to whom food availability is never a problem.
The pace of change even seems to be accelerating in developed countries in which people are increasingly time-poor and, hence, tempted to search for short-term solutions for feeding and gratification which in the long-term are destructive to their health. Whether it is feasible to reverse these tendencies completely is currently unknown. However, local initiatives in some parts of the world have achieved encouraging results by promoting consumption of foods produced within the surrounding area, treating such foods in traditional ways, and encouraging people to enjoy the foods at a much slower pace. In addition to many other effects, this movement has the benefit generally of increasing the quality of ingredients and, hence, making dishes much more palatable than they have been traditionally considered. Greater and more effective attempts at educating people in how to shop, cook, and eat food would also yield beneficial results.
While this is occurring in countries like the United Kingdom, there is still a long way to go.
See also: Access to Nutritious Foods; Hunger.
Bibliography
Philippe Apparicio, Marie-Soleil Cloutier, and Richard Shearmur, “The Case of Montreal’s Missing Food Deserts,” International Journal of Health Geography (v.6/4, 2007); M. White, “Food Access and Obesity,” Obesity Reviews (v.8/Suppl 1, 2007).
