Dear Readers,
If each installment of PH endeavors to tell a story about a major public health problem, then the literary mode required for this issue about food and nutrition would have to be irony.
This is not to say that problems surrounding food and nutrition are particularly funny. It stretches credulity to consider that 852 million people in the world go hungry each day while close to 1.7 billion receive far too much to eat. Logic wants us to balance this ledger, but time seems to be doing just the opposite. The twin epidemics of obesity and malnutrition show little sign of ‘converging’ into equilibrium; the nutrition gap is widening rather than narrowing.
It is no small irony that the world’s oldest public health problem remains its most intractable. In a hundred years, long after we find a cure for AIDS and a corrective for cancer, we will still be grappling with the health dilemmas triggered by the way we eat. Nutrition lies at the core of human existence—scientific advances are unlikely to eliminate problems that ultimately find their roots in social behavior.
On the other hand, in a hundred years we might not be able to afford any scientific advances if current nutrition trends continue. Obesity-related expenditures, which comprehend everything from spending on diabetes to heart disease, already top $100 billion per year in the United States. To put that figure in perspective, Jeffery Sachs estimates that ending global poverty would cost the world less than $200 billion a year.
Solving the world’s food problems will demand complex and coordinated social and political action—not a serum engineered in a university laboratory. Ending malnutrition in Southern Africa, Takudzwa Shumba suggests, will require overhauling the region’s agricultural system; Alexandra Suich argues that tackling obesity in the United States compels us to pursue difficult questions about class and ethnicity. Magic bullets for these kind of problems don’t exist.
As the country struggles to rebuild and regroup after the devastation wrought by Katrina, the articles in the following pages can help remind us of some fundamental truths. Public health is about more than curing diseases: it’s about politics and economics; race and class; leading and volunteering. It’s also about our generation of college students, and whether we intend to leave the world a better place than we’ve found it.
Sincerely,
Christopher Glazek
Editor-in-Chief