Obesity, malnutrition and gestation
Slim pickings
Evidence that the problem of obesity starts in the womb

Nov 11th 2010 | Lausanne | from the print edition


Hiding from the future

IN THE late 1980s David Barker, a British doctor, suggested that what a woman eats when she is pregnant shapes her child’s physiology for life. He called the idea fetal programming. Such programming would allow an individual to make optimum use of available nutrients, on the assumption that his own diet will be similar to his mother’s. If it was not similar, though, there could be problems. Dr Barker speculated that fetal programming—in mesalliance with the spread of fatty, sugary foods over recent decades—might explain the epidemic of obesity, heart disease and late-onset diabetes that plagues many rich countries.

It is a neat theory, but hard to prove. On October 29th, though, Sir Peter Gluckman, an endocrinologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, presented evidence to support it at a conference organised in Lausanne by Nestlé, a Swiss food company. Dr Gluckman carried out his study in Jamaica, in collaboration with Terrence Forrester, of the University of the West Indies. He picked Jamaica because malnutrition is endemic there. That allows the theory of fetal programming to be tested by finding out whether those who experienced malnutrition in the womb respond differently to food than those who were properly fed.

Dr Gluckman and Dr Forrester began their study by looking at people who had survived childhood malnutrition. Symptoms normally manifest themselves in one of two ways, known as marasmus and kwashiorkor. Children with marasmus are simply emaciated. The abdomens of those with kwashiorkor, however, distend in a way that is distressingly familiar from televised appeals for famine relief. One significant difference between the two syndromes is that children with marasmus are twice as likely to survive malnutrition as those with kwashiorkor.


Dr Gluckman and Dr Forrester looked at 240 people aged between 25 and 40 who had survived one syndrome or the other as children, and found a systematic difference between them. The marasmus survivors tended to have had low birthweights. The kwashiorkor group had normal birthweights. Low birthweight is an indication of a malnourished mother. Dr Gluckman and Dr Forrester thus hypothesise that the capacity for a marasmus-style response to malnutrition, with its higher survival rate, is programmed into fetuses by maternal malnourishment. Fetuses carried by well-nourished mothers do not, as it were, anticipate the risk of malnutrition, and thus respond to it less well.

That suggests fetal programming is a real phenomenon. But can it help explain obesity, diabetes and so on? To investigate this, the two researchers then offered their volunteers foods that were either high in protein and low in fat, or low in protein and high in fat—but which, crucially, tasted the same, so that they did not know what they were eating.

They found that those who had survived marasmus ate differently from those who had survived kwashiorkor. The bodies of marasmus survivors seemed to demand more protein in their food. When offered a diet low in protein and high in fat, they consumed more of it. That kept their protein intake constant, but meant they were eating 500 calories a day more than a normal maintenance diet (2,000 calories for women and 2,500 for men). Kwashiorkor survivors did not overeat in this way.

This, then, may be the key that unlocks the puzzle. Diets of the past would tend to have been lean (that is, to have favoured protein and complex carbohydrates like starch over fats and sugars). Anticipating scarcity by overeating in times of plenty would be no bad thing if times of scarcity were a real risk. Bodies that expected food to be plentiful, by contrast, should ration themselves to avoid the consequences of chronic overeating. An inability to do that is the price paid for protection from famine by those predisposed to marasmus.

This study thus makes a prediction: as diets become high in sugar and fat in places where malnutrition was once common, those who suffered marasmus as children will become overweight more rapidly than those who suffered kwashiorkor. If that turns out to be the case, it will be evidence that Dr Barker was right. What is not yet clear is whether the children of today’s overfed westerners will experience programming in the opposite direction, and have their appetites restricted.

NYC's anti-soda ad -- the war is ON (point to Mayor Bloomberg)!
By
Nancy Churnin - Reporter

nchurnin@dallasnews.com | Bio

9:56 AM on Sun., Jun. 3, 2012 | Permalink




New York City Health Department has launched its first anti-soda ad and gotta say, it's a killer -- killer for the soda industry that is. Just as the "pink slime" memo about an ammonia additive in beef brought outrage and wholesale banning of that additive in many stores in March (pink slime is not permitted in Canada, the United Kingdom and the European Union at all by the way), I think this ad is going to make a lot of people think twice about assaulting their bodies with all that sugar.

The multi-million dollar American Beverage Association may be up in arms about this later salvo in the soda wars (it started when the soft drink industry spent $13 million in lobbying efforts in 2010 to beat back Bloomberg's efforts to tax sugary drinks or restrict the use of food stamps to buy them), but my advice is to remember what happened to our Irving-based Hostess Brands, Inc. with its line of sugary Twinkies, Ho Hos and Ding Dongs (emerged from bankruptcy in 2009, to declare Chapter 11 again this year).

It's time to do an extreme pivot and find another way to make your millions than selling items that damage health (causing long-term weight gain and increased risk of heart disease, diabetes and cancer) and have no positive nutritional value. Soda is OVER guys. Time to think about a new direction -- how about one that serves society instead of hurts it?

nobody? come on. we must be past absolutes. here:

Record numbers go hungry in the US

Government report shows 50m people unable to put food on the table at some point last year

More than a million children regularly go to bed hungry in the US, according to a government report that shows a startling increase in the number of families struggling to put food on the table.

President Barack Obama, who pledged to eradicate childhood hunger, has described as "unsettling" the agriculture department survey, which says 50 million people in the US – one in six of the population – were unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy at some point last year, in large part because of escalating unemployment or poorly paid jobs. That is a rise of more than one-third on the year before and the highest number since the survey began in 1995.

The agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, said: "These numbers are a wake-up call … for us to get very serious about food security and hunger, about nutrition and food safety in this country."

Vilsack said he expected the numbers to worsen when the survey for this year is released in 2010.

The report said 6.7 million people were defined as having "very low food security" because they regularly lacked sufficient to eat. Among them, 96% reported that the food they bought did not last until they had money to buy more. Nearly all said they could not afford to eat balanced meals. Although few reported that this was a permanent situation throughout the year, 88% said it had occurred in three or more months.

Nearly half reported losing weight because they did not have enough money to buy food.

The number of children living in households where there were shortages of food at times rose by nearly one-third to 17 million. The report says that most parents who did not get enough to eat ensured their offspring received sufficient food but that more than 1 million children still suffered outright hunger.

The worst affected states are in the south with Mississippi having the largest proportion of its population enduring shortages of food followed by Texas and Arkansas. More than half of those affected are minorities, principally black people and Hispanics.

Millions more Americans do not go hungry only because they are so poor they receive government food stamps or rely on handouts from food banks such as Feeding America. In some states, such as West Virginia, one in six of the population is on food stamps.

Vicki Escarra, head of Feeding America which runs 200 food banks across the country feeding 25 million people, described the report as "alarming" and noted that the situation is continuing to deteriorate.

"Although these new numbers are staggering, it should be noted that these numbers reflect the state of the nation one year ago, in 2008. Since then the economy has significantly weakened, and there are likely many more people struggling with hunger than this report states," she said.

Feeding America said there had been a "dramatic increase" in requests for emergency food assistance from food banks across the US. It said that food banks in some parts of the country were requesting more than a 50% increase in assistance than over a year ago.

"Our network food banks are calling us every day, telling us that demand for emergency food is higher than it has ever been in our history," said Escarra.

The principal cause is unemployment, which has risen past 10%, as well as increasing numbers of people who have had their hours cut back or been forced in to minimum wage jobs. Even before the recent economic collapse many working people were struggling to meet rising living costs, such as those who drive long distances to their jobs in rural states who were hit by the rising cost of fuel.

Feeding America said 40%of the people it helps live in families with at least one working adult.

Charities say that many of those who fall into financial difficulties take years to get back on their feet and so the problem is likely to persist for years.

The report comes as the United Nations holds a summit in Rome on food security. The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, told the summit that a child dies of hunger every five seconds somewhere in the world and that more than 1 billion live with hunger.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/17/millions-hungry-households-us-report

what are the statistics for countries that have embraced full libertarianism regarding poverty? why are there developed nations in europe with what would easily be called welfare states that are prosperous and that have a smaller percentage of hungry than the us. why?

11 June 2012 Last updated at 19:01 ET

Resource depletion: Opportunity or looming catastrophe?

By Richard Anderson Business reporter, BBC News



An empty bowl of food We will need to produce 70% more food by 2050 to meet the demands of the world's massively expanding population, according to the United Nations


Imagine a world of spiralling food prices, water shortages and soaring energy costs.

For many living in the world today, this nightmare scenario is already a reality. Even for the well-off living in developed economies, it is becoming all too familiar.

And on current projections, it's going to get a whole lot worse. Short-term fluctuations in supply and demand aside, a global population explosion combined with finite resources means the planet cannot sustain ever-increasing levels of consumption using current models of production.

And there isn't much time to do something about it.

"The challenge we are facing over the next 20 years is unprecedented," says Fraser Thompson, senior fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute.

Exploding population

In the past 10 years, global commodity price increases have wiped out all the declines seen during the past century, during which prices almost halved despite a fourfold increase in the world's population and a massive expansion in the global economy.

The reasons for such price falls were simple - the discovery of new sources of relatively cheap supply allied with new technologies.

Global commodity prices since 1900

But the era of abundant cheap resources is drawing to an end, for reasons equally straightforward.

The global population currently stands at seven billion people, and is predicted to rise to more than nine billion by 2050 - that's roughly the population of the UK being added to the planet every year.

More importantly, there could be up to three billion new middle-class consumers, mainly in China and India, according to McKinsey. They will drive demand for meat, consumer goods and urban infrastructure, not to mention the energy needed to produce them, to levels unheard of in human history. For example, McKinsey expects the number of cars in the world to double by 2030.

Fossil fuel reserves

Fuel

Oil


Reserves 1,386 billion barrels


Years left 46.2


Gas 187.1 trillion cubic metres


Years left 58.6


Coal 860,938 million tonnes


Years left 118

Source: BP. Reserves calculated at current price using current technologies

And while demand for resources from an exploding and wealthier population soars, finding and extracting new sources of supply is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive.

For example, oil companies have to look further and drill deeper to find dwindling reserves of oil, meaning the cost of an average well has doubled in the past ten years, while new mining discoveries have been largely flat despite a fourfold increase in exploration costs.

The discovery of shale gas could have a major impact on meeting global energy needs in the decades to come, but as Laszlo Varro, head of gas, coal and power markets at the International Energy Agency, says, just burning current reserves of fossil fuels using existing technologies would create enough carbon dioxide "to boil the planet several times over".



Water shortages

But it's not just traditional energy sources that are a cause for concern, particularly given that resources are becoming increasingly linked, with shortages and price movements in one having a much greater impact on others.

Resource depletion in numbers

It took 130,000 years for the earth's population to reach 800 million in about 1780. Currently, almost 800 million are added every 10 years

About 200 years ago, each human had the equivalent of 24 football fields of land and freshwater resources. Today, each human has three fields and in 40 years it will be less than two

By 2030, there will be three billion more middle-class consumers in the global economy
Water scarcity affects one in three people on every continent of the globe

On current trends, over the next 20 years humans will use 40% more water than they do now
It takes 2,400 litres of water to produce a hamburger and 11,000 litres to make a pair of jeans
The average cost of drilling for oil has doubled over the past decade

Forty-four million people were driven into poverty by rising food prices in the second half of 2010

Demand for steel is set to rise by 80% between 2010 and 2030.

Sources: McKinsey, Homo Sapiens Foundation, World Health Organisation, Protected Water Fund

Take water, which underpins the production of pretty much every manufactured product on earth - for example, almost 50 gallons are used to extract one gallon of oil, says Dr Richard Mattison, chief executive of corporate environmental research group Trucost.

Demand for water over the next 30 years is projected to rise by almost a half at a time when the groundwater table in many regions of the world is falling and large areas are suffering from shortages due to drought, large-scale irrigation, pollution, dams and even war.

Finite land resources are also coming under enormous pressure.

Urbanisation displaces millions of hectares of high-quality agricultural land each year - McKinsey estimates that prime land equivalent in size to Italy could be sacrificed to expanding cities in less than 20 years.

At the same time, tens of thousands of square kilometres of pristine forest are cut down to grow crops needed for food, of which we will need 70% more by 2050 to feed the world's massively expanding population, according to the United Nations.

In fact, vast swathes of natural land are being converted for all manner of uses across the world, destroying essential so-called ecosystem services such as flood protection and genetic resources used for live-saving drugs.


'Critical list'

But it's not just physical depletion that leads to scarcity. For some resources, political and financial factors can exacerbate the problem, particularly in the short term.

A recent survey by consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) found a shortage of key minerals and metals could "disrupt entire economies".

The Rocinha shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Click here to watch how the global population has exploded over the past 200 years

It compiled a "critical list" including lithium, which is widely used in batteries and wind turbines, cobalt, again a key component in rechargeable batteries, and tantalum, which is used in mobile phones and computers.

Geologists prefer not to speculate on the planet's finite reserves of these valuable resources, some of which are already running low, for the simple fact that more could be discovered, but political factors alone make them hard to come by.

China, for example, where most so-called rare-earth elements are found, already severely restricts exports to other countries. India and Vietnam have also curbed exports of mineral resources and the pressure for other countries to follow suit is growing.

Equally, increasingly volatile commodity prices, borne in part of increasing uncertainty over supply, mean companies are less willing to invest in discovering new supplies, unsure of the return they will make on their investment.

This creates a potential vicious circle, where volatile prices have an impact on supply, making prices yet more volatile, all the while exacerbating the problem of scarcity.

Radical solutions

Clearly, then, something has to give if humans are to live within the Earth's means, as they must.
A dried-up reservoir Companies are being forced to spend huge amounts of money to secure their water supplies

As Martin Chilcott, founder of the sustainable business community 2degrees, which counts many of the world's largest corporations among its members, says: "The potentially infinite increase in demand for products is clearly unsustainable.

"Given finite resources, population growth allied with the growing middle classes means the maths just doesn't add up."

Some argue the answers are already out there. Productivity improvements, Mr Thompson says, would alone help meet almost 30% of demand for resources by 2030 and present trillions of dollars of savings to global companies.

New technologies, substitute materials and greater investment in supply will also be needed, he says. McKinsey estimates that about $3tn a year would help meet demand for steel, water, agricultural products and energy. This is about 50% more than current investment.

Others argue more radical solutions are required.

"Policy intervention is needed to protect resources that are not priced or incorrectly priced," says Malcolm Preston, global sustainability leader at PwC.

Profits lost if water priced correctly

Water is a case in point. Despite being the world's most precious and increasingly scarce resource, it is incredibly cheap, and in many parts of the world, free.

Correcting this price anomaly would have huge consequences for businesses. Trucost has calculated that more than a quarter of profits of the world's biggest companies would be wiped out if water was priced to reflect its value, as it must be.

Land is another example. Huge chunks of the natural world have no monetary value placed upon them, and yet they provide services worth trillions of dollars to the global economy. Only now is this value being recognised, and painstakingly calculated.

Energy efficiencies, renewable energy and a massive increase in recycling will also be needed.

Some are even calling for what is known as a circular economy, a comprehensive rethink of our current model of production and consumption, where one company's waste is another's raw material, and where obsession with the ownership of material goods is moderated.

Inevitable for some, an unrealistic step too far for others. But one thing is certain, as things stand the numbers don't add up and the odds are stacked against us. Drastic change is needed.

13 June 2012 Last updated at 07:25 ET


What caused the obesity crisis in the West?
Jacques Peretti


British people are on average nearly three stone (24kg) heavier than 50 years ago, but who or what is to blame? Jacques Peretti (pictured above) investigates.

Contrary to popular belief, we as a race have not become greedier or less active in recent years. But one thing that has changed is the food we eat, and, more specifically, the sheer amount of sugar we ingest.

"Genetically, human beings haven't changed, but our environment, our access to cheap food has," says Professor Jimmy Bell, obesity specialist at Imperial College, London.

"We're being bombarded every day by the food industry to consume more and more food.

"It's a war between our bodies and the demands our body makes, and the accessibility that modern society gives us with food. And as a scientist I feel really depressed, because we are losing the war against obesity."

One of the biggest changes in our modern diet stems back to the 1970s when US agriculture embarked on the mass-production of corn and of high-fructose corn syrup, commonly used as a sweetener in processed foods.
Continue reading the main story
Find Out More

The Men Who Made Us Fat is broadcast on BBC Two at 21:00 BST on Thursdays from 14 June

Watch online via iPlayer (UK only) or check for repeats at the above link

This led to a massive surge in the quantities of cheaper food being supplied to American supermarkets, everything from cheap cereal to cheap biscuits. As a result, burgers got bigger and fries (fried in corn oil) got fattier.

According to nutritionist Marion Nestle, this paved the way for obesity.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

Obesity is caused when people consume too many calories without the exercise to balance it out”

Susan Neely American Beverage Association

"The number of calories produced in America, and available to American consumers, went from 3,200 in the 1970s and early 80s to 3,900 per person, almost twice as much as anybody needed. And that enormous increase, I think it's the cause of a great deal of difficulty," she says.

High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), a highly sweet by-product of waste corn, was also incredibly cheap. It began being used in every conceivable food - pizzas, coleslaw, meat. It provided a "just baked" sheen on bread and cakes.

By the mid 1980s, corn syrup had replaced sugar in fizzy soft drinks. The move made financial sense from the soft drink companies' point of view, as corn syrup was a third cheaper than sugar.

But it was also sweeter and, argue some scientists, more addictive. In the next two decades, the average American's consumption of fizzy drinks almost doubled - from 350 cans a year to 600.

But Susan Neely from the American Beverage Association says the increased consumption of fizzy drinks is not to blame for increased obesity in the West.

"The evidence says that obesity is caused when people consume too many calories without the exercise to balance it out," she says.

"Certainly our regular soft drinks are a source of calories, so if you're consuming too many calories and watching too much television or not getting enough exercise, you're going to have a problem."
Weight gain

Dr Jean-Marc Schwarz from San Francisco General Hospital says it's the sheer amount of fructose being consumed that makes it dangerous.
Continue reading the main story
Sugars: What's the difference?
Sugar

Sucrose is the sugar we know as basic table sugar. It contains both glucose and fructose.
Glucose is found in fruits in small amounts. Glucose syrup is made from corn starch.
Fructose is the main sugar occurring naturally in all fruits. It also occurs in high-fructose corn syrup.

BBC Health: Fats and sugars

"It doesn't have a toxic effect like lead. It's not comparable to lead or mercury, but it's the quantity that just makes it toxic," he says.

Fructose is easily converted to fat in the body, and scientists have found that it also suppresses the action of a vital hormone called leptin.

"Leptin goes from your fat cells to your brain and tells your brain you've had enough, you don't need to eat that second piece of cheesecake," says Dr Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist.

He says when the liver is overloaded with sugars, leptin simply stops working, and as a result the body doesn't know when it's full.

"It makes your brain think you're starving and now what you have is a vicious cycle of consumption, disease and addiction. Which explains what has happened the world over," he says.
Heart disease

In the mid-1970s, a fierce debate raged behind the closed doors of academia over heart disease. It boiled down to one simple question: what causes it - sugar or fat?

The view that fat was to blame prevailed, and in doing so it created an entirely new genre of food - "low-fat" products.

The creation of "low fat" promised an immense business opportunity forged from the potential disaster of heart disease.
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“Start Quote

When you're eating food that is highly hedonic, it sort of takes over your brain”

David Kessler Former head, US Food and Drug Administration

Overnight, low-fat products arrived on the shelves. Low-fat yoghurts, spreads, desserts and biscuits. All with the fat taken out, and largely replaced with sugar.

The public embraced the new products, believing them to be healthier. But the more sugar we ate, the more we wanted.

By the time anyone began to ask if it was a good thing to replace fat with sugar, it was too late - but it was a decision with huge implications for the obesity crisis.

"If fat's the cause, that's a good thing to do," says Dr Lustig. "If sugar's the cause, that's a disastrous thing to do… and I think over the last 30 years we've answered that question."

David Kessler, the ex-head of the US government's most powerful food agency, the Food and Drug Administration, believes sugar - together with fat and salt - appeals to our brains in the same way as addictive substances.

"It gives you this momentary bliss," Mr Kessler says. "So when you're eating food that is highly hedonic, it sort of takes over your brain."

Terry Jones, from the UK's Food and Drink Federation, says: "All the time the science is changing, the thinking around how to tackle the problem is changing.
Continue reading the main story
Obesity and lifestyle

What is obesity? It is normally defined as a Body Mass Index (BMI) over 30
Use the BMI calculator to check your BMI, from your weight in kilograms divided by your height in metres squared
According to figures from 2009, almost a quarter of UK adults are obese (22% of men and 24% of women)
Find out more about healthy living or explore a Diet and Fitness plan to suit you

"This is an industry which takes its responsibilities very seriously. It has already done an awful lot and will continue to do so, and we know that there's a real commitment behind us playing our full part in public health."

The US Sugar Association are keen to point out that that sugar intake alone "is not linked to any lifestyle disease", but scientists are now beginning to think there is something specific about fructose which accelerates obesity.

If a link with obesity is established beyond doubt, we could see the food industry creating a whole new market for low-sugar products, according to former Coca-Cola executive Hank Cardello, who is campaigning to get corporations to tackle obesity.

"The silver lining in the challenge of obesity is that even though it's a problem, it creates a galvanising effect.

"Companies need to make money, and consumers need to eat food that is convenient and tastes good, and from the public health perspective we need products that are healthier. And all those need to come together."

The Men Who Made Us Fat is broadcast on BBC Two at 21:00 BST on Thursdays from 14 June. Watch online via iPlayer (UK only) or check for repeats at the above link.

I Think, Therefore I Yam

When farmland is scarce, will we all eat roots and tubers?

By Will Oremus|Posted Tuesday, June 12, 2012, at 6:30 AM ET


A farmer holds up a bunch of cassava roots, dug up from his farm in Oshogbo, in Osun State on August 26, 2010.


Photograph by Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images.

Since Thomas Malthus, alarmists have been pointing out that the world has a finite amount of arable land, whereas its human population keeps growing. Common sense would seem to dictate that eventually there won’t be enough farmland to feed everyone, and catastrophic famine will ensue.

The incredible pace of technological innovation has staved off that eventuality for hundreds of years, seemingly making fools of Malthus and intellectual successors like Paul R. Ehrlich, who in his 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted mass starvation in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, the green revolution brought high-yielding crop varieties, fertilizers, and pesticides to hungry countries such as Mexico and India, leading to a doubling of food production between 1950 and 2010 with only a 10 percent increase in the amount of farmland. And in the past decade, global population growth has slowed, a deeply encouraging sign (and one that neither Malthus nor Ehrlich envisioned).

Yet the world’s food future may be shakier than ever. It’s not because of the absolute number of people or even the amount of available farmland, but because of what those people eat and how that farmland is used. In short, there’s enough land to feed the world—but not enough to feed the world Big Macs. Absent another productivity revolution, the 21st century might raise a new question for farmers: If beef provides the smallest amount of calories per acre of land required to raise it, what crops provide the most?


Today about 1 billion people “eat like Westerners,” in the words of University of California-Berkeley resource economist David Zilberman. That means, basically, that they wolf down historically unprecedented quantities of meat and dairy—getting up to half their calories from animals rather than plants. Meat consumption appears to be reaching a plateau in the United States and Europe, but it’s only now taking off in many poorer parts of the world. Zilberman believes that 40 years from now there may be 3 billion or 4 billion people who eat like Westerners. And that’s a problem, because every pound of edible beef takes some 20 pounds of grain to produce. Give a man a 12-ounce porterhouse and you feed him for a day; give him a pound of grain and you can feed a dozen other people for a day, too. (Raising meat also requires five to 10 times as much water as growing grains, using up a resource that may prove even scarcer than land.)

In a 2009 study, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that production would have to rise 70 percent by 2050 to meet the world’s needs. But Zilberman and others believe that the continued rise of the global middle class could result in a number much higher than that. By his lights, even if we were to develop all of the world’s remaining arable land—much of it in Brazil and other Latin American countries—we’d have to wring twice as much productivity from every acre of land under cultivation. While that’s not impossible, it won’t be easy. Water is one obstacle, as is the increasing proportion of grain that’s being used for biofuels rather than food. A third problem, less talked about, is that intensive farming practices appear to be degrading the world’s topsoil, raising the possibility that usable farmland will actually become scarcer in future decades. Climate change could exacerbate the problem, as droughts turn what today is arable land into desert. (Taking off on the concept of “peak oil,” agriculture alarmists have labeled this specter “peak soil.”)

If that happens, people may have little choice but to eat less meat. What would they eat instead? Vegetables are crucial to nutrition, but they aren’t the most potent energy sources. Grains are better, but people already eat plenty of them, and they’re not at the top of the list in terms of the amount of nutrition they provide per unit of land. That honor goes to roots and tubers like garlic, sunchokes, and sweet potatoes.

A world of yam-eaters might seem far-fetched, but some food-security zealots are already preparing for the worst. One of them is John Jeavons, a Willits, Calif.-based advocate of what he calls “biointensive farming.” Back in the early 1970s, when people still feared the original population bomb, Jeavons began to explore how people could grow everything they needed on the smallest possible plot of ground. Building on the methods of organic-farming pioneer Alan Chadwick, Jeavons developed an eight-point gardening system that calls for close spacing of plants, vigorous composting and soil maintenance, and “calorie farming,” which means focusing on crops that produce the most nutrition in the least space.

According to the FAO, sweet potatoes top the list, yielding 70,000 calories per hectare per day, nearly twice as much as wheat—and far more than that if you use one of several fast-maturing varieties. Jeavons also recommends potatoes, leeks, and parsnips for those looking to maximize calories per acre. (Cassava, a crucial subsistence crop in many developing countries, is less efficient because it takes longer to grow.) In the ideal subsistence farm, Jeavons says, roots and tubers would account for 30 percent of all the land cultivated for food.

His techniques, spread through his nonprofit Ecology Action, have caught on with some farmers in countries like Kenya, where farmland is scarce and people are hungry. The question is, could that movement catch on globally?

Jeavons is optimistic that farmers, consumers, and world policy-makers will come around if and when the world’s impending food crisis becomes more apparent. But much of the world’s food is produced under contract with multinational processing and distribution companies whose interest is in maximizing profits, not calories. Factory farms tend to focus on one or two crops, a strategy that might damage the land over time but is highly efficient in the short term. Suggest to an agribusiness executive that he start devoting half his land to the cultivation of compost and another big chunk to salsify and Jerusalem artichoke, and he’ll probably laugh.

On the consumption side, new-wave nutrition gurus such as Michael Pollan have sold a lot of books calling for Americans to eat less fast food and more organic vegetables, and the nation’s meat consumption appears to have peaked around 2007. But organic farming actually yields less food per acre than today’s conventional methods, at least in the short term. And compared with fresh veggies, roots and tubers are probably a tougher sell for your average Whole Foods shopper. Even a spike in food prices might not be enough to make most Westerners change their diets substantially. “Things would have to get really bad to make people eat less meat and more cassava,” Zilberman says. (He thinks genetic engineering is a more realistic solution.)

Instead, it would hurt the people in poor countries who have trouble affording food as it is. In a world where there isn’t enough food to go around, one thing probably won’t change: Most starvation will still be a product of inequality rather than global supply shortage. It’s just that there will be a lot more of it there is now.

Also in the special issue on food: five “food frontiers,” including technologies to make diet food tastier and fight salmonella; smart packaging may help keep your produce from going bad; small-scale farmers decide whether to embrace automated agricultural equipment; and the case for bringing back home ec. This article arises from Future Tense, a joint partnership of Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State University.

Why cuisine is working as a social tool for change in Peru

Star chef Ferran Adrià has teamed up with a Peruvian colleague to make a documentary
The film charts the stories of some of the 80,000 culinary students in the country

Rosa Rivas Madrid 14 JUN 2012 - 16:10 CET

Ferran Adria (r) and Peruvian chef Gaston Acurio (l) during a press conference in Lima. / ERNESTO BENAVIDES (AFP)


"Young people in Peru don't dream of being soccer players, they dream of being chefs." Those were the words of Ferran Adrià in 2011, when his friend and fellow chef Gastón Acurio introduced him to the gastronomic wonders of a country with more than 80,000 culinary students, and where cooking is an engine of economic and social progress.

That fascination led the two chefs to take a journey around the markets, kitchens and agricultural areas of Peru - the coast, the mountains and the Amazon were just a few of the stops on a gastro-tour that was all captured on video. The impact of the resulting documentary is sufficiently great for it to have been presented on Monday at the United Nations by its stars and narrators.

Perú sabe: la cocina como arma social (or, Peru knows: cuisine as a social weapon), written and directed by Jesús María Santos, lasts 71 minutes and has been produced by Media Networks and Tensacalma. It will be broadcast by Plus TV in Peru, by Univisión in the United States, and by Radio Televisión Española (RTVE) in Europe.

According to Adrià, the chef behind the world-famous elBulli restaurant, Peruvian cuisine "is an example for the rest of Latin America and the world," and is "a way of expressing culture." The content of the documentary is a "hymn to optimism, and offers hope in today's difficult world," Adrià told news agency Efe in New York on Monday.

Before its international launch at the UN, the documentary was screened in Lima, where Adrià and Acurio inaugurated a new course dedicated to waiting tables and service, at the Pachacútec culinary school. The academy was founded by Acurio, who has risen to almost rock-star status in Peru, and is often described as the country's answer to British chef and star of the small screen Jamie Oliver.

The Pachacútec school is for young, disadvantaged students, and some of them have had their stories documented in the film,

Optimism, tenacity, creativity and innovation are the key ingredients in the message that Adrià wants to get across to the young chefs in Latin America. The Spaniard also believes that Colombia will be the next place where cuisine will have a positive socio-economic influence, as has happened in Peru.

As is the case with Adrià, Acurio has signed a four-year strategic agreement with Spanish telecoms giant Telefónica, which will see him working on social integration projects via gastronomy and technology.