Hilal Elver, the U.N.’s special representative on the right to food, blames free trade and increased industrial food production for excess amounts of cheap junk food, “effectively violating [many people’s] right to adequate food.”
Elver says that nearly 800 million people live in hunger worldwide, but more than 2 billion people are micro-nutrient deficient, and another 600 million people are obese.
Though many people don’t think of it this way, obese is often a sign – and the result – of malnourishment.
This is a topic I’ve written about before. In countries where there simply isn’t enough food to go around, people are emaciated with bloated bellies.
But in industrialized and developing countries, obesity is often a consequence of poverty, but also of location. Urban dwellers tend to live in areas where cheap “junk” food is everywhere, but access to healthy food like fresh produce is non-existent (food deserts).
According to U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) stats from a few years ago, the most recent data available, children and adults in America on average consumed more than 12% of their daily calories from fast-food restaurants.
The agency noted, however, that in the U.S., people’s poverty status did not significantly affect those numbers. The facts run contrary to the long-held belief that the biggest consumers of fast-food in America are low-income families.
