On October 16th, World Food Day is celebrated globally. This commemoration, organized by the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) and its affiliates around the world, involves various activities to raise awareness about the major global inequalities concerning access to food, hunger, and poverty, as well as topics related to global food security.
Each year, the event focuses on a specific issue. This year’s edition is titled “The climate is changing. Food and agriculture must too.” Essentially, it aims to raise awareness about the effects of climate change related to unsustainable food production and its impact on eating habits. It is paradoxical that, worldwide, many small-scale farmers, fishers, and herders represent the majority of the 800 million people suffering from chronic malnutrition. If they cannot secure their daily food, less social and economic growth is possible. The FAO has set the goal of eradicating hunger, designating 2030 as zero hunger, where no person in the world should have their access to food compromised.
You may ask, all this sounds very nice, but what can we do? There are many actions we can take as small consumers. First, try to support local producers by consuming their products. How many foods from small-scale production do we include in our basic food basket? Another solution is to reduce the consumption of packaging in the products we buy, and to minimize the waste of what we consume and what we leave unused.
Have you noticed that the issue of food for all includes more than just recommendations for the nutrition of vulnerable populations? The problem of hunger in the world, along with the serious waste and ecological footprint resulting from our consumption habits, involves more than nutrients. It is a complex relationship of geopolitical factors that make certain populations more vulnerable, combined with their capacity to produce resources, directly related to economic and climatic factors. I reiterate: we must think of food as a multifaceted problem requiring the intervention of many disciplines. Conversely, when I am asked about the causes of obesity and chronic degenerative diseases in Mexico, I always try to illustrate these issues as part of the same continuum as hunger, but at the opposite extreme: when we understand that people, besides nutrients, eat symbols, emotions, identifications, and traces of the sociopolitical conditions of our environment, we will realize that these problems cannot be addressed with a simple, single-cause policy that merely cuts the weed, only for it to reappear elsewhere. To learn more about this topic, the document “Why Do Mexicans Eat What We Eat?” will soon be available online, further exemplifying these conditions.
I invite you to celebrate World Food Day by taking one action for our own nutrition and another for those who have less.
Originally published in El Economista
@Lillie_ML
#worldfoodday #food #inequality #poverty #foodsecurity #consumption
— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.