Australian Politics Forum

According to recent research reported in medical journal, The Lancet, overall, over-eating is a bigger threat to the world population's health than hunger. This does not mean that there will be no food shortages as the human population trends towards 9 (or even 10) billion. But if fewer people over-eat the available food will go further.

Like many global problems it is more complicated than it seems on the surface. Over-eating of sugars and carbohydrates can occur at the same time as people are eating insufficient fruit, vegetables, roughage and trace elements.

Part of the problem is subsidisation of broad-acre crops like corn in the US and elsewhere and the (admirable) supply chain efficiency of global fast food providers such as McDonalds and YUM! Foods compared with other more nourishing supply chains. Then, amongst low income people there seems to be a generational erosion in home cultivation and cooking skills. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, grannie could feed a family of 6 for 3 nights by killing a chicken, digging up potatoes in the back yard, picking beans and spinach, and using some tomatoes she'd bottled a couple of months ago.

Whose grannie can do this now?

I don't have quotable sources but erosion of home skills seems to me a big factor in obesity in the Western world.

An interesting thread.

Will this generation ever take up the skills of tending backyard chicken pens and vege patches? I think more people will, especially as food gets more expensive and money gets harder to find.

Plates were smaller back in the days of one chicken feeding a family of four for Sunday dinner, the leftovers put into chicken soup for Monday tea and a couple of sandwiches for dad's lunch.

Fatties were few and far between back then, they lived on the smell of the chicken, the meals mainly consisted of vegetables and bread. The chicken doesn't go so far when everyone has a quarter at one sitting.

Did you watch that program on tele last night newtown grafitti? It was filmed in Cardiff, Wales and the little kids were living on a diet of sugar, every meal was frozen fast food or take away....sad how we've become so lazy.

I started a backyard vege patch this year, but I must say if I had to survive on my efforts I'd be a gonner for sure, but I'm learning and home grown veges always taste better.

This fast food trend started when mum went out to work because one wage didn't cover the mortgage or the rent.

The next Great Depression will sort it out, back to self sufficiency. It's coming, like it or not!

thing is its the starchy stuff thats cheap. So poor ppl in western countries are the fat ones.

SOB

Sir Spot of Borg wrote on Dec 29^th, 2012 at 6:24am:

thing is its the starchy stuff thats cheap. So poor ppl in western countries are the fat ones.

SOB

Too true. You can get a loaf of bread for as little as $1 if you look around, but you wouldn't get much fruit or veg for that.

I still think you could make yourself a healthy alternative for the price of a big mac meal.

newtown_grafitti wrote on Dec 28^th, 2012 at 9:42pm:

I struggle to see the connection between third world starvation and Western obesity. Do they really think that if Westerners eat less that this food will automatically go to famine ravaged countries in Africa?

Can you really equate a 60 year old westerner dieing of a heart attack with children dieing of starvation and disease in Africa or India?

It seems the claim that

Quote:

if fewer people over-eat the available food will go further

is an exercise in statistics and doesn't have any relevance in the real world.

newtown_grafitti wrote on Dec 28^th, 2012 at 9:42pm:

I don't have quotable sources but erosion of home skills seems to me a big factor in obesity in the Western world.

I think you're right. This, along with the old "I don't have time to cook a healthy meal after work" chestnut would account for the majority of the phenomenon.

But what accounts for the erosion of home skills, AND greater work demands?

One word: Feminism.

... wrote on Jan 2^nd, 2013 at 9:03am:

newtown_grafitti wrote on Dec 28^th, 2012 at 9:42pm:

I don't have quotable sources but erosion of home skills seems to me a big factor in obesity in the Western world.

If femininism is the motivator for men learning how to cook for themselves, wash and iron their own clothes and generally pick up after themselves, we need a new wave. Imagine the possibilities.

Annie Anthrax wrote on Jan 2^nd, 2013 at 9:15am:

... wrote on Jan 2^nd, 2013 at 9:03am:

newtown_grafitti wrote on Dec 28^th, 2012 at 9:42pm:

I don't have quotable sources but erosion of home skills seems to me a big factor in obesity in the Western world.

If femininism is the motivator for men learning how to cook for themselves, wash and iron their own clothes and generally pick up after themselves, we need a new wave. Imagine the possibilities.

Exactly right. A generation of fat, unhealthy,inert, brainwashed kids is a small price to pay for a tidier house. ::)

Of course, it's not often men that these children live with, so it's quite irrelevant.

I don't believe there is an erosion of home skills. They're just not purely the domain of women anymore. How anybody can argue against that being a good thing is beyond me.

Face it, Wes. Feminism has taught men to be more self-sufficient. You're welcome.

Annie Anthrax wrote on Jan 2^nd, 2013 at 9:34am:

LOL. Look at the examples of 'home skills' given earlier - tending/killing/eating chickens, pickling/bottling veges for later consumption - Men haven't picked up the slack left by women - they just don't get done at all. Even a friggin home cooked meal is somewhat of an oddity these days. If that's not a loss of home skills, I'm andrea dworkin.

what came first
the chicken or the egg

do men hate feminists because they are generally arrogant bitches

or do arrogant bitches hate men because they sense men dont like them.

feminists have possibly the worst game plan ever invented.

with the wave of labour saving devices they could have sat and home and played tennis and bridge and gone shopping and been the least stressed demographic in the history of mankind.

instead they voluntarily chose (or were mustered) into a world of work stress and domestic stress and sheer exhaustion.

all so they could afford a few more pairs of stilettos that they never wear as they are too tired to go out ;) ;).

and they call the blondes dumb :D :D :D

aquascoot wrote on Jan 2^nd, 2013 at 10:06am:

feminists have possibly the worst game plan ever invented.

with the wave of labour saving devices they could have sat and home and played tennis and bridge and gone shopping and been the least stressed demographic in the history of mankind.

instead they voluntarily chose (or were mustered) into a world of work stress and domestic stress and sheer exhaustion.

Which makes it obvious (to me) that feminism has been commandeered for use as a vehicle to deliver hapless dependency and corporate rule. Now, with the idoelogy firmly entrenched in very aspect of society, we can but sit and wait until the feminists get a clue that maybe, just maybe, feminism hasn't been an unfettered good, and we've been sold a dud under false pretences. But by then, will it be too late?

IMAGE....

There is always one dissenter in a crowd, isn't there !

SHE SAID IT !! ....the 'mensa' girl.

protester.jpg (173 KB | 52 )

This topic has nothing to do with feminism. Women still cook from scratch in 80% of the world. You won't find microwaves in the villages of the Philippines, or India, or Indonesia.

The cause of this issue is the marketing of processed food. As Newtown says, it's about US corn dumping and the marketing of high-sugar products. It's an orchestrated, long-term strategy by US food companies to get access to the world's developing markets. It involves the WTO, US farm subsidies, global patent legislation for seeds, and the business models of food giants like Proctor & Gamble, Unilever and Nestle.

Take Nestle - a Swiss company that basically sells processed corn, rice and milk powder with all the nutrition taken out of it. It advertises products like Milo on billboards around the world as a quick, healthy energy food. It's a long-term strategy that brands Nestle products as "health" food when in reality they're just chocolate and sugar. The developing world often views these products as modern and efficient. In many countries, Nestle infant formula is seen as a modern alternative to breast feeding. Since the introduction of these high-processed, globalized foods, countries like China have multiplied obesity levels in the space of 10 years.

Nestle represents a strategy by Western corporations and their paid politicians to reposition the developed world following the loss of its manufacturing sector. Food products are essentially intellectual property - from the genetically modified seed to the logo on the hamburger. If a company owns the patent and the supply chain, it owns the product, wherever the food is actually produced.

It's a business model pioneered by Cocal Cola. Coke holds the "secret" recipe, outsources the bottling, and places the product throughout the world "within an arm's reach of desire." The production line is lubricated by a sophisticated advertising campaign. All Coke actually produces is the syrup and the brand. The rest is all selling.

The global rise in obesity levels has nothing to do with feminism and everything to do with the globalization of processed food. It also has a lot to do with corn, and the post-war genius of US food technology in adapting and finding so many uses for it. Corn is in almost every processed food you can buy. Palm oil doesn't even come close.

Corn represents US hegemony at every level - from its government agricultural subsidies to its development and marketing boards to Monsanto's ownership of the GM corn patents to its use by US processed and fast food companies.

China might have taken over the world's manufacturing, but the US still owns the monopoly in global soy, maise, meat and corn production. One US surplus dump of cheap corn can wipe out a developing country's farm sector. The US has done this to Mexico and the Philippines, effectively putting local corn growers out of business and ensuring future (subsidized) US exports.

Yes, friends, this is what we call "free trade".

Karnal wrote on Jan 2^nd, 2013 at 12:25pm:

This topic has nothing to do with feminism. Women still cook from scratch in 80% of the world. You won't find microwaves in the villages of the Philippines, or India, or Indonesia.

You won't find feminists there either. :)

Quote:

In many countries, Nestle infant formula is seen as a modern alternative to breast feeding. Since the introduction of these high-processed, globalized foods, countries like China have multiplied obesity levels in the space of 10 years.

Formula is marketed as "emancipation" from the drudgery of motherhood. Without corporate feminism, there would be no market for formula, and a vastly reduced market for fast food, since fast food is also marketed on the same principle of emancipation from the drudgery of feeding ones offsrping. Fast and processed food directly causes higher obesity rates but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Without the government/corporate machines other social poisons, such as feminism manipulating the market, it wouldn't have the grip it does.

... wrote on Jan 2^nd, 2013 at 9:03am:

One word: Feminism.

Thank men for women’s lib
The male side of the feminist struggle has been Lloyd Evans 15 December 2012

Social History. London, England 13th February 1908. Emily Pankhurst, a member of the Suffragette movement, is arrested by police officers.

Let’s get this straight. I’m a feminist. That’s the way I was brought up. My mum was a passionate women’s libber and I always agreed with my mum — even when she was wrong — but she was right on that one. The struggle to free one sex has liberated both. The human species is now freer, more dynamic and more fulfilled than ever.

But here’s the oddity. When I read histories of the women’s movement I rarely find any hint that men were involved at all. Men are either sidelined completely or portrayed as a bunch of sexist wreckers who strove to hold women back at every turn.

Quite untrue, of course. But a fascinating prejudice. What’s even more fascinating is to discover why it still goes unchallenged. First, a few facts. Progressive men were at the forefront of the struggle for women’s liberation. And they didn’t just support the movement; at crucial moments, they led it.

The suffragettes were part of a wider crusade against injustice in all its forms. Its brand name was socialism and its leaders were predominantly male. Marx and Engels campaigned for equality between the classes. And between the sexes. Bernard Shaw’s plays satirised the shameful position of women in Edwardian society as ornamental chattels and drawing-room jewellery boxes. The first Labour MP, Keir Hardie, along with influential thinkers like H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, Sidney Webb, John Maynard Keynes and others, argued passionately for women’s suffrage. Even that notorious womaniser Lloyd George sided with the feminists when it mattered. As prime minister, he led the all-male parliament that passed the Representation of the People Act in 1918 and gave women the right to vote and to stand as MPs. Like it or not, Lloyd George is the original British feminist. Now, it’s true that these reformers hadn’t always seen the issue in this way. But as circumstances changed, they changed their minds. And they shifted tack not because a few posh ladies chained themselves to some railings but because men, in their millions, were pursuing a typically male activity: having a war.

In 1914, men trooped off to the Western Front, and women were called in to run the factories, workshops and farms. Women built tanks and guns. They drove lorries and tractors. ‘Men’s work’ turned out to be well within their capabilities. This social upheaval dismantled all the antique patriarchal certainties. War promoted women. It gave them responsibility at work, independence at home and cash in their pockets. They were free to dress as they pleased, to socialise where they liked, to drive, to smoke, to buy books and educate themselves. The war created a vast leap forward in the rights and expectations of women. And by 1918, the pressure to make them full partners in democracy had become irresistible. That was the result of 1914-1918. Men got killed. Women got the vote.

When peace returned, so did the veterans. And being men, they toddled off to their science labs and their garden sheds to pursue another characteristic male activity: bodging and tinkering and inventing new ‘thingummies’. And what thingummies they invented. During the 20th century, men came up with a huge array of technical wizardry that freed the world from the endless enslavement of domestic toil. Toasters, blenders, tinned food, central heating, washable fabrics, lawn-mowers, power-tools, microwaves, Superglue, ready meals, powdered soup. The list is endless.

By the 1950s, this technical revolution had made domestic service — whose burden had always fallen disproportionately on women — a thing of the past. Centuries of drudgery were ending and women were emerging from the shadows. Chaps? Take a bow.

And in 1961 came the greatest single act of liberation in human history. The pill. Now, some will argue that men devised the pill in order to increase women’s sexual availability to them. Well, maybe. But that doesn’t diminish its success in freeing women from the shackles of their biology. It brought an end to the 23-pregnancy marriage. And it consigned that silent killer, the back-room abortionist, to the dustbin of deranged science. Women were now free to postpone starting a family until after they’d finished their education. Or, if they were still at home raising a couple of kids (rather than a couple of dozen), they had the chance to study at the Open University, which was created by the socialist thinker Michael Young and introduced during Harold Wilson’s second administration. Both men were, of course, men.

By the mid-1960s, women were ready to enact the final phase of their revolution: complete equality under the law. Here again, men offered a lead. The civil rights protestors in America and the ‘great march’ on Washington inspired the women’s lib movement and gave it urgency and bite. The lesson from America was that aggressive tactics were far more effective than polite lobbying. Women’s lib marchers took to the streets and demanded an end to discrimination at work. And they got it, more or less immediately.

The Equal Pay Act was brought in here in 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975. Both are primarily male reforms, by the way, because men in the Commons at that time outnumbered women by 30 to one.

You will, of course, have spotted the glaring omission in all this. Throughout history it was ‘bloody men’ who oppressed and exploited women. But these ‘bloody men’ were merely responding to Mother Nature’s uneven distribution of responsibilities which made sexual inequality a fact of life for hundreds of thousands of years. Finally, in the 20th century, we all wised up. Enlightened men, at the insistence of enlightened women, took on the ‘bloody men’ and campaigned for a fairer settlement. And it was male habits of behaviour that catalysed the key changes: male aggression, male ingenuity and ultimately men’s sense of fair play and social justice.

So feminism is largely a male achievement. But far from getting the credit, we men have been airbrushed out of that history altogether. What’s truly amazing, given how vain and boastful we are, is that we couldn’t care less. Why so bashful about one of our greatest ever triumphs?

Here’s my explanation. The sex wars have redefined what it is to be a man and to be a woman. The tragic irony is that the new settlement leaves women — yet again — at a huge disadvantage. A woman who wants to feel ‘properly liberated’ today has to shoulder twice as much donkey work as her grandmother. Raising a family isn’t enough. She needs a career as well. And to settle for anything less is to accept a major downgrade in her status as a woman.

Men face no such extra duties. Naturally we like to ‘do our bit’ around the kitchen, the nursery and the supermarket. ‘Bit’ being the operative word. In my case I reckon I handle about 15 per cent of the housework. And my wife reckons I handle about 0.0015 per cent of it, but hey-ho. This wasn’t our revolution. They asked for it. And we bowed to their superior wisdom.

For men, the happiest result of the new deal is the quality of the women we now face across the dating table. Women are smarter, sleeker, richer, better educated and bigger-boobed than they ever were. They get drunk more easily. They have sex more readily. Sometimes they even pay for dinner as well, ‘to assert their independence’. And do we stop them? No, Madame Chairperson, we do not. We’re feminists too, of course, and we make that pledge not because we’re shamed by the historic plight of women but because we’ve learned that it’s a great aphrodisiac.

This thesis will make uncomfortable reading for women. For men, on the other hand, it’s completely taboo. We males have reached a tacit agreement to avoid the subject of women’s emancipation altogether, and to draw a discreet veil over the fabulous peace-deal we’ve signed up for. If women want to portray us as a gang of bigoted throwbacks who never lifted a finger to liberate them, that’s fine by us. Small price to pay. The last thing we want to do is rock the boat. Because from our viewpoint — up in first class, as always — this cruise has never been better.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8790741/thank-men-for-womens-lib/

excellent read soren. ;) ;)

i still feel like throttling blokes who talk about SWMBO and cant go fishing til they get enough "brownie points"
and those pathetic looking guys wandering around shopping malls with their wives experiencing "together time" ;) ;)

"Australia, NZ running short of baby formula brand as tourists swoop"

http://genevalunch.com/blog/2013/01/03/australia-nz-running-short-of-baby-formula-brand-as-tourists-swoop/

Ex Dame Pansi wrote on Dec 29^th, 2012 at 6:49am:

Sir Spot of Borg wrote on Dec 29^th, 2012 at 6:24am:

thing is its the starchy stuff thats cheap. So poor ppl in western countries are the fat ones.

SOB

A PLUM COST ME 70CENTS THE OTHER DAY!

Australian Politics Forum
http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl General Discussion >> Thinking Globally >> Gluttony trumps starvation http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1356694927 Message started by newtown_grafitti on Dec 28^th, 2012 at 9:42pm