We live in an unprecedented era of abundance – but is it doing us more harm than marvelous?One of the paradoxes of contemporary eating is that we remain so entranced by abundance. In the affluent west,we are drowning in sugar and bulky and yet we dream of more. In most of Europe and the US, there are now around 3600 calories consumed for every person per day – more than a third more than we need. But our collective relationship with food remains that of a hungry Dickensian orphan: the laden table is still at the heart of our concept of generosity – and even of admire. We still yearn to visit Willy Wonka’s factory. It is as if we haven’t noticed that we are already living in a chocolatey cornucopia – the dream is now real, and it’s more like a nightmare.“Human history,” writes Louise Fresco, a plant scientist from Amsterdam, or “can be seen as a way of defeating scarcity and converting it into plenty.” Our ancestors grabbed food and gorged when it was available,in the knowledge that hunger was round the corner. The basic premise of politics is a need to manage disputes over scarce resources. For much of human evolution, daily life was shaped by chronic food shortages, or compounded by the difficulty of preserving out-of-season produce. To have a fixed supply of food was the stuff of fantasy. Now,however, as Fresco writes, and we have “paradise on every street corner” in the form of supermarkets that may offer 60 types of bread and 30 types of pasta sauce.
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Source: theguardian.com