I liked this paragraph in the Observer this morning:
The 7UP tin is quite an artefact. It shows capitalism at its most efficient and rapacious: where ingredients — sugar, flavouring, water — costing almost nothing can be turned into a profit margin measured in the thousands of per cent. It illustrates the extraordinary diversion of farmland and forest into the production of the almost useless while nearly a billion people on the planet are starving. The can is an icon of the key dietary changes of the era, where we upped our simple carbohydrate intake — sugar — to the point that it started harming us in ways never seen before.
The idea that capitalism kills some by excess and others by shortage seems to sum up rather too well the whole nature of the system. And it' true that some sit by and live off the fat of the land that the sugar produces.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I have no problem with business. I do have a problem with unregulated business. And it is the job of the state to impose that regulation in the interests of the common good.
Such a good exists. Democracy can deliver consensus on regulation. The abuse created by markets can be tamed. The result is an enhancement in well being - but a reduction in the fat of the land for a few.
That's the fight that beating poverty - and business induced obesity - requires we undertake. And it's worth it - for the common good.
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There are a lot of checkable claims in this quote. Someone should check them.
Profit margin measured in thousands of percent
The diversion of farmland and forest …
Nearly a billion people on the planet are starving
One fact I don’t need to check is that most fizzy drinks do not contain sugar. Farm subsidies make sugar too expensive; corn syrup is used instead.
Read the article on sugars
You clearly have not
Here we are:
870 million people in hunger (WFP 2012) bad enough why exagerate?
Coca Cola net profit margin, mid noughties, 22%
…
It’s a shame the paragraph doesn’t mention the only ingredient of significant cost in a sugar drink: the tin it comes packed in, and the effort of getting it in to our pudgy hands.
Benjohn ,
That is what struck me so I did a little survey earlier whilst taking my Mum shopping and violating the sabbath .
The cheapest item I could find in a can was boiled potatoes at 14p for quite a large can .
Drying must be far more efficient for foods which can be preserved that way .
The cheapest in an aluminium drinks can 25p .
It’s bizarre isn’t it to have a couple of portions of potatoes or a single drink in a fabricated and plated steel can or extruded aluminium one for an all up cost of 14p a unit when some people still have to carry their water over a mile .
I always think that to argue these points we need a measure of community well-being, perhaps something simple like the “Popsicle Index”, though that unfortunately involves sugar.
Looking back over the centuries, sugar is not simply a good example of where trade and capitalism can go very wrong, all to often state intervention has had much the same effect. A major part of this is how the sugar “barons” and interests have been involved in politics. Another is how the masses became hooked on sugar to the point where the political parties had to literally “sweeten” the voters. Recall how much land was put to sugar beet supply during WW2 instead of other foods. During the 18th Century Slave Trade the government made huge efforts to protect the sugar interests. In the 21st Century the junk food industries seem to be getting major tax breaks in various ways. We may be living off the fat of the land, so to speak and not only the capitalists are to blame so are the governments who are propping them up.
If the ruling class dominates the government, what on earth do you expect to happen?
And let’s never forget that it was sugar that drove the slave trade triangle = out to West Africa for slave to take to the West Indies, to be sold there for money and sugar, which was brough back for highly profitable sale in England. A different sort of Bermida Triangle, that swallowed countless lives wherever it came into port – in Africa, the West Indies and England.
I thought you were talking about Lord Sugar at first! Though given the value system evinced by The Apprentice, the title might well be appropriate!
The ‘common good’ is a concept that makes sense at a deep psychological level but in practice is often challenged by such bogus reasoning as ‘the Nanny state’ and the mythical ‘freedom of choice’. Of course, as we know, there is a Nanny State for the Oligarchs/Plutocrats/Crony Capitalists and marketing crap to children and hard up families hardly encourages freedom of choice!
The ‘common good’ can only flourish in a spiritually and intellectually mature society – we don’t have this due to much of the financial power being in the hands of thugs whose brain structure has eliminated all forms of compunction. Unless there is a resistance to this from the ground up it will continue ad nauseam. Eating habits and economics are intertwined.
Ha! You beat me to it. I thought the headline referred to Alan Sugar as well!
It’s not just sugar it is all carbophydrate. In fact, you can make the case (as Spencer Wells does in Pandora’s Seed) that civilization is simply a consequence of agriculture and that agriculture is the source of most diseases, especially non-communicable ones like diabietes and cancer.
If you are going to regulate for the common good then I’d suggest you would start by banning all products from the grass family (from sugar through to rice via wheat and barley, all of which contain hardly any nutrients other than empty calories). Good luck getting 6 billion people to live on wild meat and foraged plants though, especially when so many health professionals ignore all the evidence and argue that carbs should make up the bulk of your diet.
The truth is, the only way to live healthily is to cook everything yourself, from scratch. And if anybody says they can’t manage that they are being absurd: I managed the whole time my wife and I were working full time and every generation of man managed until 30 years ago.
Rodger ,
Starting to prepare fresh food and moving on from sweeties is part of growing up .
Kids tend to like the breast meat of chicken whereas adults start to appreciate the richer flavours of other parts of the animal .
The super-markets do their level best to remove any evidence that the skinless , boneless , featherless , flavourless breast fillets they sell ever belonged to a living animal .
After a while I think people start to consider this normal but being so detached from the suppliers of our lifestyle is neither normal or healthy .
My nephews and niece would not touch a fish when I took them fishing .
I agree it is absurd but suspect a lot of people can’t prepare a meal from scratch and hardly anyone who has grown up in the UK over the past 30 years could knock a fish over the head or pull a chickens neck .
If society ever did break down they are not equipped to survive . Look at parliament , how many of them could wire a plug or even change a fuse ?
Striebs
I tend to agree with you on cooking from scratch
I gutted fish as a teenager, caught some rabbits and now keep chickens – and dispatching is part of the deal
But we don’t live in that world
And it shows
Richard
Many traditional diets are vegetarian – I remember spending some time, many years ago, in a Kenyan village where there was no refrigeration, with the exception of meat delivery once a week the diet was vegetarian. Meat eating has become excessive and the industry connected with it wasteful, not to mention appalling animal husbandry to serve the demand for cheap meat.
People are living longer, so the causes of their death change.
The main, some say only, cause of cancer is a failure of the immune system. The reason for that failure is an arguing point, but viruses figure very high on the list.
At the turn of the 19th/20th century the main causes of death were infectious diseases (pneumonia/TB/enteritis)……then came healthcare and antibiotics (and if George and David have their way, back to 1900 it will be)…..over 30% of deaths in 1900 were under-5s’.
Obviously, if you extend life then the things you die from gets a bit broader.
You just cannot take diet as a cause of illness in isolation. Too much of anything leads to death, even water.