India’s newly declared war on junk food represents a sharp shift in direction for the government, which until recently had been inclined to believe that it made little sense to focus on the problems of overeating when people were still dying of malnutrition.
This week, however, [India’s health minister] Ramadoss declared that the Health Ministry needed to wage a battle on two fronts, simultaneously fighting hunger and obesity.
His acknowledgment of these coexisting crises implicitly recognized the rapid emergence of two parallel Indias. He conceded that there was a growing gulf in the nation’s health concerns, a rift between the diseases of affluence and the diseases of poverty.
While the nation’s attention was caught up by the debate on how to stop India’s 300 million members of the middle class from bingeing on sugar-laden, fat-heavy diets, the National Family Health Survey was analyzing its latest data, which (when they are published formally next year) are expected to show that, despite the country’s economic boom, around 50 percent of Indian children under 5 are malnourished. Also, in some states of north India, the numbers of severely malnourished children are rising fast.
“We have one India which is galloping on the economic front, while in the other India, human development indices say we are 126th in the world,” Ramadoss said, referring to India’s low ranking out of 177 countries in the UN list.
“India is on its way to becoming a superpower, but unfortunately, 50 to 60 percent of children under 3 years are undernourished,” he told journalists covering a nutrition conference in Delhi, adding that he felt “ashamed” at the stark contrast in problems facing the nation.
“We have the IT revolution, but then we have this pitiful infant mortality,” he said. “We have on one side undernutrition and on the other side overnutrition.”
The culture of gluttonous consumption causes these epidemics. Instead of engaging in self-beneficial activities and achieving long-term goals, the people of the world shortsightedly engage in self-destructive and addictive behaviors. That is why the overworked working class of the world labor and struggle but never seem able to create a better individual life for themselves or world for all. It goes beyond food, consumerism extends to an assortment of petty and often self-destructive crap, from TV to overpriced mall-bought clothes and fancy cars – most of which people buy on credit. The poor do the same thing: Instead of fighting to bring themselves and their communities out of poverty and oppression, these people often engage in these short-sighted and self-destructive behaviors such as drug use.
Thus, instead of having a happy meritocratic world, we have this problematic world in which on one side an obese person buying pharmaceutical drugs from the grocery store with her credit card, and on the other side a skinny crackhead starving in the street.
What do you think?